THE  YOUNG  IDEA 


AUTHORS'  EDITION 

Limited  to  one  hundred  and  fifty  copies 


THE 
YOUNG    IDEA 

An  Anthology  of  Opinion  Concerning  the 

Spirit  and  Aims  of  Contemporary 

American  Literature 


BY 
LLOYD  R.  MORRIS 


NEW  YORK 

DUPFIELD  AND  COMPANY 
1917 


COPYRIGHT,  1917,  BY 
DUFFIELD  AND  COMPANY 


NOTE 

The  thanks  of  the  author  are  due  th_ 
following  editors  and  publishers  for  permis-  <- 
sion  to  reprint  in  the  present  volume  mate 
rial  copyrighted  by  them:  To  Messrs. 
Henry  Holt  and  Company,  for  the  use  of 
the  essay  by  Mr.  Louis  Untermeyer,  a  com 
pilation  of  three  causeries  which  originally 
appeared  in  the  Review  of  Reviews,  the  Chi 
cago  Evening  Post  and  the  New  York 
Evening  Post,  published  in  pamphlet  form 
by  Henry  Holt  and  Company  as  "The  New 
Spirit  in  American  Poetry:"  To  Mr.  Mitch 
ell  Kennerley,  for  the  use  of  several  para 
graphs  from  Mr.  John  Curtis  Underwood's 
"Literature  and  Insurgency:"  To  the  edi 
tors  of  the  North  American  Review  for  the 
privilege  of  reprinting  Mr.  Arthur  Davison 
Ficke's  essay,  "Modern  Tendencies  in 
Poetry:"  To  Mr.  William  Marion  Reedy 
for  permission  to  reprint  "Home  Rule  in 
Poetry,"  by  Mr.  Vachel  Lindsay,  from 

Reedy' s  Mirror. 

v 

M265589 


CONTENTS 


INTRODUCTION      -- ;  i 

I  THE  EMPIRICISTS  :  The  Kenascence  of  Com 

mon  Experience     -     -     -     -  3 

*  Conrad  Aikeh. 7 

"Witter    Bynner 10 

Will  Levington  Comfort     -     -  11 

Max  Eastman 15 

Donald  Evans 18 

John  Erskine 20 

Arthur  Davison  Ficke    -     -     -  22 

Vachel  Lindsay     -----  47 

•  Harriet  Munroe     -----  56 
James   Oppenheim     -     -     -     -  66 
Louis   Untermeyer     -     -     -     -  72 
Margaret    Widdemer      -     -     -  90 

II  THE  ROMANTICISTS 97 

»  (1)     Imagism -    -  100 

John  Gould  Fletcher    -    -    -    -  100 

Amy  Lowell 110 

(2)     Spectrism 114 

Anne  Knish    - 114 

Emanuel  Morgan 116 

vii 


viii  CONTENTS 

III  THE  IDEALISTS  :  The  Renascence  of  Spirit 

uality      121 

William  Rose  Benet 123 

Joyce    Kilmer -__  128 

Josephine  Preston  Peabody    -    -    -    -  134 

Ridgely  Torrence 140 

IV  THE  PESSIMISTS 145 

Benjamin  De  Casseres 145 

Floyd    Dell 147 

Donald  Marquis 149 

John  Curtis  Underwood 150 

V    THE  TRADITIONALISTS 173 

Fannie  Stearns  Gifford       -----  174 

Louis  V.   Ledoux 177 

John  G.  Neihardt 188 

Edward   Arlington    Robinson     -     -     -  193 

Blanche  Shoemaker  Wagstaff     -    -    -  196 

Thomas  Walsh 198 

CONCLUSION 205 


THE  YOUNG  IDEA 


INTRODUCTION 

THE  YOUNG  IDEA  is  an  outgrowth  of  the 
widespread  revival  of  interest  in  literature, 
and  more  especially  in  poetry,  which,  during 
the  past  few  years,  has  afforded  one  of  the 
most  arresting  phenomena  in  the  entire 
course  of  our  literary  history.  This  literary 
revival  has  brought  with  it  a  fresh  content 
and  many  innovations  in  form,  and  of  these 
much  has  been  written  in  interpretation  by 
critics  of  literature,  and,  frequently,  by  the 
authors  and  poets  who  have  been  concerned 
with  establishing  the  ideals  of  what  has  been 
called  the  "new  literature."  But  in  some 
degree  these  various  critical  discussions  and 
explanations  have  lacked  co-ordination,  and, 
while  Mr.  Braithwaite's  annual  anthology 
has  provided  the  basis  for  a  survey  of  the 


xii          INTRODUCTION 

yearly  accomplishment  of  the  poets,  there 
has  been  no  attempt  made  thus  far  to  pro 
vide  its  complement  in  criticism,  a  collective 
statement  of  the  ideals  and  the  ideas  upon 
which  rests  the  work  of  contemporary  Amer 
ican  writers.  Moreover,  the  confusion  with 
which  the  public  has  received  the  work  of 
the  more  radical  of  these  innovators  has  been 
paralleled,  in  some  instances,  by  the  dismay 
of  the  critics  confronted  with  a  literature 
with  whose  fundamental  contentions  they 
were  unacquainted. 

It  is  to  fill  this  void  that  THE  YOUNG  IDEA 
has  been  compiled.  Any  ambitious  critic  who 
would  interpret  the  ideals  which  are  finding 
expression  in  contemporary  American  writ 
ing,  would,  in  doing  so,  hold  himself  open 
to  the  charges  of  misconception  and  of  lack 
of  receptivity.  How,  then,  solve  the  dilemma 
otherwise  than  by  requesting  from  each  in 
dividual  author  a  statement  of  his  or  her 
ideals,  a  definition  of  the  essential  intention 
of  his  or  her  art?  \ 

This  was  a  solution  which  apparently  had 


INTRODUCTION          xiii 

not  heretofore  recommended  itself  to  the 
critics.  And  so  the  following  letter  was  sent 
out: 


My  dear  Mr. • 

I  am  compiling  a  statement  of  opinion  by 
the  younger  groups  of  American  writers 
concerning  the  contemporary  and  future 
temper  of  our  literature.  I  believe  that  such 
a  statement  would  possess  sound  value  as 
creative  criticism  and  would  center  public 
attention  upon  the  ideals  of  the  generation 
in  between.  A  well-known  publisher  has 
offered  to  take  the  book,  believing  as  firmly 
as  myself  in  the  value  of  such  a  symposium 
in  clarifying  the  ideals  and  determining  the 
essential  direction  both  of  the  literature  that 
is  being  written  to-day  and  that  which  lies 
in  the  dreams  and  aspirations  of  our  writers. 

Will  you  not,  then,  aid  me  in  my  investi 
gation  by  contributing  a  reply  to  the  follow 
ing  questions? 

Do  you  believe  that  there  is  manifest  to 
day  a  new  movement  in  our  literature?  If 


xiv         INTRODUCTION 

so,  what  are  its  ideals?  What  relation  does 
it  bear  to  the  immediate  past?  Which  of  its 
many  currents  seem  to  you  to  be  the  most 
important?  What  relation  does  your  own 
work  bear  to  this  new  movement?  What 
is  your  criticism  of  contemporary  American 
literature? 

I  shall  hold  myself  deeply  indebted  to  you 
for  your  valued  opinion  concerning  these 
questions,  which  appear  to  me  to  be  both 
important  and  interesting.  Please  feel  free 
to  reply  to  them,  either  directly  as  I  have 
stated  them,  or  to  view  the  subject  in  a  dif 
ferent  light.  In  a  word,  where  does  our 
literature  stand  to-day,  and  whither  is  it 
going? 

Whatever  you  say  will  be  published  in 
exactly  your  own  words,  over  your  own  sig 
nature,  and  there  will  be  an  introductory  and 
concluding  essay  dealing  with  the  question 
as  a  whole.  I  am  endeavoring  to  make  this 
inquiry  as  serious  as  possible,  and  as  repre 
sentative  of  the  ideals  of  our  writers  of  to 
day  and  tomorrow. 


INTRODUCTION  xv 

I  am  enclosing  herewith  a  stamped  and 
addressed  envelope,  hoping  that  you  will  find 
it  convenient  to  favor  me  with  your  opinion. 
May  I  not  call  your  attention  to  the  im 
portance  of  your  individual  opinion  to  the 
investigation  as  a  whole,  and  respectfully 
urge  you  to  favor  me  with  it? 

It  was  sent,  not  to  those  writers  of  whom, 
because  of  our  long  acquaintance  with  their 
art,  it  may  without  presumption  be  predicted 
that  their  philosophies  are  accomplished  facts 
and  that  their  work  is  likely  to  suffer  little 
change  in  the  future,  but  to  those  writers 
who,  since  they  are  shaping  our  contempo 
rary  literature  by  expressing  the  spirit  of 
today,  are  also  in  a  measure  illuminating 
our  literary  ideals  of  tomorrow.  It  is  in  this 
sense  that  this  little  book  justifies  its  claim 
to  be  an  expression  of  the  young  idea.  For 
it  is  only  in  the  degree  that  we  are  aware 
of  what  our  quest  is  today,  that  we  may 
hope  for  enlightenment  of  the  spirit  of  the 
immediate  future, 


xvi          INTRODUCTION 

The  response  to  this  inquiry  has  been  most 
gratifying,  and  the  authors  whose  contribu 
tions  to  the  investigation  appear  in  the  body 
of  this  book  have  co-operated  generously 
by  stating  frankly  what  they  are  about.  The 
fact  that  absolute  freedom  of  statement  was 
a  condition  of  the  inquiry  accounts  for  the 
disparity  in  length  between  the  various  con 
tributions. 

A  word  must  necessarily  be  said  in  ex 
planation  of  the  grouping  of  the  contribu 
tions.  As  I  read  the  replies,  I  discovered 
certain  outstanding  ideas  so  strongly  em 
phasized  that,  when  they  appeared  common 
to  the  points  of  view  of  several  of  the  writers, 
they  suggested  the  divisions  because  of  an 
essential  unity  of  direction. 

Thus,  for  example,  the  writers  who  Have 
been  grouped  as  The  Empiricists  have  indi 
vidually  emphasized  as  the  most  important 
content  of  their  art  a  concern  with  the  com 
mon  experience  of  contemporary  American 
life.  The  Idealists  share  the  belief  that  the 
most  significant  tendency  in  our  contempor- 


INTRODUCTION         xvii 

ary  poetry  is  its  return  to  primitive  faith  and 
its  expression  of  spiritual  experience. 

The  chapter  called  the  Romanticists  in 
cludes  expressions  of  the  philosophy  of 
two  movements  whose  existence  is  defi 
nitely  admitted;  the  oldest  and  the  youngest 
of  those  groups  of  contemporary  poets  who, 
holding  certain  ideals  in  common,  have 
formed  schools  and  promulgated  consistent 
programs.  And  since  both  of  these  schools 
have  been,  in  their  art,  concerned  chiefly  with 
the  extension  of  poetic  form,  always  a  ro 
mantic  revolt,  I  have  grouped  them  as  Ro 
manticists.  The  Pessimists  are  those  who 
find  nothing  of  any  essential  importance  in 
contemporary  American  letters ;  and  one  of 
them  grounds  his  pessimism  upon  a  flagellat 
ing  denunciation  of  our  contemporary  na 
tional  life.  The  Traditionalists,  I  think,  re 
quire  no  explanation. 

I  hope  that  the  readers  of  this  little  book 
will  derive  from  it  a  fuller  understanding  of 
the  aims  and  of  the  ideals  of  our  own  contem 
porary  writers,  For  if  we  believe  that  lit- 


xviii        INTRODUCTION 

erature  is  a  record  of  and  a  reaction  to  ex 
perience,  we  shall  learn  from  our  writers 
what  it  is,  in  thought  and  in  feeling,  that 
we  stand  for  as  a  nation.  Our  literature  has, 
quite  obviously,  been  undergoing  certain 
changes;  and  we  should  discover  whether 
these  changes  are  the  expression  of  a  parallel 
process  taking  place  in  our  national  con 
sciousness  and  in  our  national  experience. 
If  we  find  that  they  are,  we  must  believe 
that  we  are  in  a  period  of  transition  between 
old  ideals  and  new  ones.  And,  should  we 
find  this  to  be  the  case,  it  is  to  our  writers 
that  we  must  look  for  the  light  wherewith 
we  may  see  the  ideals  of  tomorrow. 

LLOYD  R.  MORRIS. 


THE  EMPIRICISTS: 

THE  RENASCENCE  OF  COMMON 
EXPERIENCE 


THE    EMPIRICISTS 

EMPIRICISM  as  a  philosophical  doctrine 
implies  actual  contact  with  experience;  in 
its  strictest  form  it  claims  that  all  knowledge 
is  derived  from  experience  through  the 
senses.  It  would  be  unfair,  however,  to 
adopt  this  term  of  philosophical  usage  and 
employ  it  as  a  generic  description  of  a  group 
of  writers  who  share  in  common  certain 
ideals,  without  explaining  the  significance 
which,  in  so  doing,  we  attach  to  the  word 
itself. 

The  writers  in  question  unite  in  express 
ing  a  lively  interest  in  the  world  about  them, 
in  how  people  in  their  time  and  country  are 
living,  and  what  they  are  thinking  and  feel 
ing.  They  are  concerned  with  the  problems, 
social,  moral,  intellectual,  aesthetic,  which 

3 


4         THE   YOUNG   IDEA 

arise  from  an  attempt  to  adjust  American 
life  to  American  ideals.  As  poets  they  are 
refusing  to  be  bound  by  rules  or  traditions 
inherited  from  the  past  which  would  limit  the 
subject-matter  of  their  art.  They  are  claim 
ing  the  freedom  of  selection  of  the  novelist, 
the  right  to  deal  with  life  as  they  find  it,  and 
in  its  own  terms.  And  in  so  doing,  they  are 
bringing  about  a  change  in  our  conception 
of  what  actually  is  meant  by  the  word  poetic. 
In  this  discovery  of  the  romance  of  the 
commonplace  there  is  evident  a  riotous  in 
toxication.  In  the  true  sense  of  the  word 
it  has  been  a  discovery,  and  the  poets,  having 
broken  the  bonds,  whether  fancied  or  real, 
which  shackled  them  to  a  conventionally 
accepted  relation  to  experience,  have  become 
drunk  with  life.  They  are  experiencing  a 
magic  wonder  at  familiar  things  with  some 
thing  of  the  same  penetrating  vision  and  in 
stinctive  truthful  reaction  we  find  in  children 
who  are  called  upon  to  adjust  themselves 
for  the  first  time  to  a  new  situation  of  which 
they  have  previously  been  told  nothing. 


THE    EMPIRICISTS        5 

Wonder  comes  with  difficulty  to  the  sophisti 
cated  soul.  And  the  person  whom  conven 
tion  has  taught  what  he  should  and  what  he 
should  not  see  is  likely  to  be  ashamed  of  and 
to  suppress  the  immediate  and  natural  re 
action  to  experience  which  either  disconcerts 
or  charms  us  when  it  is  expressed  by  a  child 
like  mind.  These  poets  are  the  childlike 
minds  of  our  day.  They  are  discovering 
to  us  what  we  might  discover  for  ourselves 
had  we  their  vision  and  their  courage.  They 
are  enthralled  by  the  strange  spell  of  their 
own  time,  by  its  science,  its  mechanical  in 
ventions,  its  laboring  masses,  its  tremendous 
industrial  activity,  its  new  ways  of  living 
and  thinking.  The  most  thoughtful  among 
them  are  asking  its  meaning  in  terms  of  in 
telligence  or  spirituality,  seeking  to  extend 
their  discovery  beyond  the  mere  surface  of 
common  experience  into  the  realm  of  the 
mind  and  the  spirit,  reading  the  contempo 
rary  in  the  light  of  the  eternal.  The  others 
are  content  to  record  their  immediate  and 
instructive  reaction  to  common  experience; 


6         THE   YOUNG   IDEA 

itself.  But  they  share  the  instant  and  pres 
ent  quest  of  the  pattern  of  daily  life  and  its 
problems. 

Some  writers  in  every  age,  perhaps,  have 
made  this  discovery  of  their  own  times.  But 
rarely  before  has  the  search  and  the  discov 
ery  been  so  general,  and  the  writers,  as 
many  of  them  here  point  out,  been  so  busy 
in  making  the  discovery  of  their  own  mind. 
The  combination  of  conscious  introspection 
and  a  naive  reaction  to  everyday  experience 
is  one  of  rare  novelty,  and  it  has  bestowed 
a  peculiar  flavor  upon  our  literature. 
Finally,  each  age,  in  making  its  own  world, 
is  making  a  new  world ;  and  its  discovery  is 
each  time  a  fresh  discovery. 

So  that  this  new  spirit  in  our  literature 
may  be  called  the  spirit  of  empiricism,  and 
the  writers  who  are  expressing  it  are  em 
piricists,  in  that  they  are  testing  out  their 
art  in  the  light  of  common  experience,  and 
demanding  of  it  that  it  shall  express  an 
honest  and  sincere  reaction  to  our  life,  our 
thought  and  our  feelings  to-day. 


THE    EMPIRICISTS        7 

Mr.  Conrad  Aiken,  the  author  of  "Earth 
Triumphant,"  "Turns  and  Movies,"  and 
"The  Jig  of  Forslin,"  in  the  following  letter 
clearly  defines  the  fundamental  intention  of 
his  art.  But  his  letter  is  something  more 
than  a  personal  definition;  it  is  an  exception 
ally  penetrating  diagnosis  of  the  contempor 
ary  state  of  American  poetry. 

In  one  respect  the  literary  situation  in 
America  today  is  an  anomalous  one.    In  so 
far  as  there  is  a  definite  revival  of  letters 
here,  and  I  think  there  is,  it  is  limited  almost 
entirely  to  the  domain  of  poetry.    It  is  as  if 
the  poets  had  got  tired  of  waiting  for  the 
novelists  to  take  hold  of  modern  ideas  and 
modern  conditions,  to  bring  literature  up  to 
date,  and  had  resolved  to  do  it  themselves. 
While  the  greater  part  of  our  fiction  is  still 
amiably  superficial  and  romantically  ideal 
istic,  with  here  and  there  such  encouraging 
exceptions  as  the  work  of  Theodore  Dreiser, 
our  poets  have  all  of  a  sudden,  and  with  an 
extraordinary  simultaneity  which  reminds 


8        THE    YOUNG   IDEA 

us  almost  of  the  Elizabethan  age,  extended 
the  claims  of  poetry  in  many  new  directions 
and  with  considerable  success.  Poetry  has 
now  appeared  among  the  best  sellers,  and  it 
would  not  be  at  all  surprising,  and,  to  my 
mind,  a  good  thing,  if  poetry  should  to  some 
extent  usurp  the  field  of  the  novel  or  of  the 
epic — in  fact,  be  restored  to  its  original 
estate,  with  all  life  for  its  province,  and  all 
knowledge,  too. 

Several  distinct  tendencies  are  manifest 
in  this  poetic  renaissance.  At  bottom,  two 
ordinarily  antithetical  currents  are  now  flow 
ing  side  by  side:  the  romantic  and  the  real 
istic.  Each  of  these  two  main  currents  can 
be  divided  into  subsidiary  currents ;  there  are 
conservative  romanticists  and  radical,  just 
as  there  are  conservative  and  radical  realists. 
Of  the  realists,  Masters — to  choose  one  ex 
ample — is  the  most  radical,  both  as  regards 
form  and  ideas,  and  Frost,  perhaps,  the  most 
conservative.  Of  the  romanticists,  I  think 
it  might  be  said  that  Fletcher  is  the  most 
consistently  radical — and  the  Imagists  in 


THE    EMPIRICISTS        9 

general — and  there  are  many  conservatives, 
with  none  outstanding.  In  general,  I  believe 
it  can  safely  be  said  that  it  is  the  radicals 
of  the  two  groups  who  are  doing  the  most 
interesting  work,  the  work  most  likely  to 
have  cumulative  influence. 

These  classifications  are,  of  course,  vague 
and  perhaps  unjust.  Frost,  for  example,  is 
conservative  as  regards  form  but  radical  as 
regards  matter ;  he  imports  into  poetry  much 
that  would  have  seemed  unpoetic  ten  years 
ago. 

Whether  the  romantic  or  the  realistic  will 
dominate,  it  is  almost  impossible  to  say.  Do 
we  want  poetry  to  deal  exclusively  with  a 
world  of  the  imagination,  a  world  of  illusion 
and  beauty?  Or  do  we  want  to  have  it  deal 
with  man  as  he  really  is,  illusions,  disillusions 
and  all?  ...  Do  we  want  work  such  as 
the  Imagists  give  us,  sensory  phenomena 
presented  discretely,  unrelated  to  any  cog 
nitive  functions,  vividly  descriptive,  pri 
marily  gtatic, — or  work  which  aims  primar 
ily  at  an  understanding  of  man? 


10       THE    YOUNG   IDEA 

Personally,  I  should  like  to  see  a  fusion  of 
the  two:  to  see  the  romantic  method — color 
ful,  sensuous,  illusion-making — employed 
for  a  realistic  end.  I  should  like  to  see  poetry 
become  scientific  in  its  search  for  truth,  pen- 
erating,  destructive,  comprehensive;  not  so 
much  desiring  to  find  beauty  as  to  be  beauty, 
no  matter  what  be  the  subject  treated.  Two 
cardinal  principles  should  govern  it:  it  must 
tell  the  truth,  and  it  must  be  a  work  of  art. 

Of  Mr.  Witter  Bynner,  Mr.  Untermeyer 
has  written  that  "he  can  get  magic  and  meta 
physics  out  of  a  Pullman  smoker."  It  is  in 
teresting  to  note  that  he  finds  our  present 
renascence  of  poetry  a  reaction  against  the 
influence  of  the  nineties. 

0 

There  is  a  new  vigor  in  poetry,  he 
writes.  As  I  see  it,  the  people  are  respond 
ing  to  a  renewal  of  humaness  among  the 
poets;  human  subjects,  natural  language 
and  vital  impulses.  We  have  been  slowly 
emerging  from  the  aesthetic  vanity  of  the 


THE    EMPIRICISTS      11 

nineties  toward  poetic  health  again ;  and  the 
public  is  quick  now  to  perceive  it.  The  pat 
ter  of  the  so-called  "schools"  of  poetry  will 
do  no  harm,  I  think;  for  they  will  freshen 
and  diversify  technique.  But  they  are  a 
side-show.  And  the  three  rings  in  the  main 
tent  are  beauty,  vigor  and  common-sense. 

Mr.  Will  Levington  Comfort's  letter  is 
of  peculiar  interest  in  establishing  the  pro 
pinquity  of  the  viewpoint  of  the  younger 
generation  of  American  novelists  to  that  of 
the  younger  group  of  American  poets.  His 
comment  upon  the  effect  of  the  moving  pic 
ture  on  the  form  and  content  of  our  fiction 
is  worthy  of  serious  consideration. 

A  fresh  and  different  vitality  is  manifest 
to-day  in  North  American  literature.  At 
various  points  around  us,  dealing  with  words, 
colors,  and  the  subtler  tools,  are  active  young 
workmen  who,  for  the  first  time,  in  the  full 
est  sense,  may  be  termed  "North  American." 

The  first  characteristic  of  this  new  element, 


12       THE    YOUNG   IDEA 

these  young,  flexible  and  very  vigorous 
minds,  is  that  they  are  workmen — not 
laborers,  not  professionals,  not  primarily 
artists  in  anything,  unless  it  be  life — but 
workers  first,  and  after  that,  novelists,  poets, 
musicians,  painters  or  politicians. 

They  are  not  competitors.  They  have  not 
forgotten  the  warm  side  of  justice,  but  they 
knew  well  the  stern  face  of  compassion — 
they  know  that  it  takes  Christ  and  anti- 
Christ  to  make  a  world.  They  are  neither 
modest  nor  egotistical,  being  for  the  most 
part  busy  and  intensely  alive,  which  implies 
joy.  They  are  not  responsible  for  their 
parents. 

The  great  love-story  has  not  been  written. 
The  few  great  love-stories  of  the  world  have 
to  be  pieced  out  by  the  imagination.  We 
find  that  we  have  been  told  that  they  are 
great  love-stories,  but  they  do  not  stand  ex 
amination.  The  classic  form  will  not  do  for 
the  New  Age.  There  is  to  be  a  new  lan 
guage — for  literary  handling.  It  may  be 
called  American,  to  distinguish  it  from 


THE    EMPIRICISTS      13 

lish  in  the  accepted  form.  It  is  to  be  brisk, 
brief,  brave  and  ebullient — to  meet  the  mod 
ern  modification  all  must  reckon  with — the 
screen-trained  mind. 

American-mindedness,  of  itself  now,  would 
never  accept  a  great  love-story.  It  would 
be  called  "sentimental,"  if  not  lascivious. 
The  average  American  is  an  impossible  lover, 
making  it  incident  to  business.  The  real  and 
the  sham  are  equally  above  him.  He  would 
not  know  when  to  be  exalted  or  when  to  be 
ashamed.  He  thinks  his  own  passion  is  evil, 
and  thus  makes  it  so.  The  great  love-story 
can  only  be  written  with  creative  dynamics, 
and  can  only  be  accepted  by  the  few  of  cor 
responding  receptivity.  There  is  nothing 
soft  about  true  romance.  Some  passionate 
singer  of  the  New  Age  will  likely  appear 
right  soon,  his  story  to  have  the  full  redo 
lence  and  lustre  of  the  heart,  his  emotions 
thoroughbred,  his  literary  quality  at  the  same 
time  crystalline  with  Reality. 

The  big  adventure-story  has  not  been  done 
so  far.  The  day  of  guns,  horses  and  redskins 


14       THE    YOUNG    IDEA 

is  over.  Photoplays  have  developed  such  fic 
tion  resources  to  the  limit,  proving  to  those 
writers  who  were  born  to  be  modern  that 
their  full  tales  can  never  be  shown  on  a  flat 
surface.  There  will  be  undercurrents,  over 
tones,  invisible  movements,  tensions  upon  the 
reader,  not  only  from  between  the  lines,  but 
between  words.  The  story-teller  of  the  New 
Age  may  handle  his  theme  in  words  of  one 
syllable,  but  his  tale  will  have  an  intensity 
scarcely  to  be  explained — only  responded  to 
by  minds  which  cannot  be  satisfied  by  two- 
plane  production — minds  which  demand 
more  of  life  than  the  camera  sees. 

The  real  war-story  of  today,  even  for  to 
morrow,  ought  to  arrive  soon.  This  is  an 
age  for  an  epic.  Some  keen  and  compre 
hensive  mind  will  arise — a  literary  genius  who 
will  include  the  patriot,  the  anarchist,  the 
poet,  dramatist,  humanitarian,  theosophist, 
dreamer,  judge  and  statesman — and  tell  the 
Story  of  War,  a  tale  of  trenches,  kings  and 
arms;  blood,  heroism  and  monstrous  greed; 
vast,  far-reaching  causes  and  the  slow,  inev- 


THE    EMPIRICISTS      15 

itable  hell  of  effects — told  from  a  viewpoint 
so  inclusive  that  thrones  are  merely  pawns 
in  a  Planetary  Game. 

Inclusion  is  the  first  business  of  the  writer 
who  is  truly  allied  with  the  modern  element. 
Propagandists  do  not  fill  the  picture.  Yes 
terday  the  knockers  and  agnostics — today 
the  specialists  and  one-sided  enthusiasts — to 
morrow  the  embodiers,  the  includers.  Whit 
man  is  the  arch-type  for  builders  to  come; 
Nietzsche  the  master-wrecker;  these  are  the 
guidons  of  the  New  Generation — the  pillar 
of  cloud  by  day,  the  pillar  of  fire  by  night. 

Mr.  Max  Eastman,  editor  of  "The 
Masses,"  poet  and  critic,  wrote  some  years 
ago  an  illuminating  and  beautiful  book  called 
"The  Enjoyment  of  Poetry."  His  contri 
bution  analyzes  the  new  movement  in  our 
life  which  he  believes  our  art  will  record.  It 
may  be  added  that  in  his  latest  book,  "Jour 
nalism  vs.  Art,"  he  has  voiced  his  disagree 
ment  with  the  champions  of  the  free  verse 
forms.  And,  therefore,  with  respect  to  his 


16       THE    YOUNG   IDEA 

theory  of  poetic  form,  he  ranks  among  the 
conservatives.  But  his  criticism  of  the  con 
tent  of  contemporary  art  proclaims  him  a 
revolutionist. 

I  think  that  the  first  three  paragraphs  of 
my  review  of  a  book  by  Rebecca  West  are 
an  answer  to  the  question  you  ask  in  your 
letter.  I  do  not  suppose  there  has  ever 
been  an  age  when  there  was  not  a  "new  move 
ment  in  literature."  And,  as  to  literary 
movements  as  such,  I  am  not  so  much  inter 
ested  in  them.  But  there  is  certainly  a 
movement  in  our  life  today  which  will  be  re 
flected  in  literature  as  contemporary  life 
always  is,  and  I  think  these  paragraphs  in 
dicate  my  feeling  as  to  what  it  is  and  what 
relation  my  work  bears  to  it. 

"Every  full-blooded  young  person  has  in 
his  arteries  a  certain  amount  of  scorn.  Lit 
erary  young  persons  have  usually  directed 
this  scorn  against  philistinism,  the  middle 
class  monotonies,  and  any  provincial  obtuse- 
ness  to  those  finer  values  discriminated  by 


THE    EMPIRICISTS      17 

the  cultured  and  by  those  who  possess  Art. 
But  in  our  day  the  full-blooded  young  per 
sons  have  got  their  scorn  directed  against  a 
more  important  evil — against  the  ground- 
plan  of  money-competition  built  on  indus 
trial  slavery  which  orders  our  civilization  and 
makes  all  our  judgments  of  value,  even  the 
most  cultured,  impure.  Indeed,  we  suspect 
everything  that  is  called  culture — we  suspect 
it  of  the  taint  of  pecuniary  elegance.  We 
have  armed  our  critical  judgment  with  Thor- 
stein  Veblen's  "Theory  of  the  Leisure  Class" 
— perhaps  the  greatest  book  of  our  day,  for 
it  combines  a  new  flavor  in  literature  with  a 
new  and  great  truth  in  science.  This  theory 
has  taught  us  how  to  see  through  "culture." 
We  know  something  about  knowledge.  We 
have  been  "put  wise"  to  sophistication. 

Moreover,  we  have  tasted  an  affirmative 
and  universal  sympathy  with  all  realities  of 
life  that  lies  far  out  and  beyond  culture  in 
the  mind's  adventure.  We  have  drunk  of 
the  universe  in  Walt  Whitman's  poetry. 

And  of  "Art,"  too,  we  have  our  intolerant 


18       THE    YOUNG   IDEA 

suspicion — a  suspicion  grounded  in  the  fact 
that  the  whole  standard  of  judgment  by 
which  art  is  judged  was  evolved  in  the  parlor 
play  of  a  petty  minority  of  the  race  left  idle 
by  the  tragic  and  real  bitterness  of  life's 
experiences  accorded  to  the  majority  who 
never  spoke.  We  have  read  Tolstoy's  great 
mad  indictment  of  European  art.  We  have 
made  ready  to  knife  the  whole  canvas,  if 
necessary,  in  favor  of  a  coarser  and  more 
universal  reality.  That  is  the  direction  in 
which  our  blood  is  coursing.  We  are  filled 
with  scorn,  as  every  young  builder  is  filled 
with  scorn.  But  our  scorn  makes  of  us  rank 
and  democratic  revolutionists  instead  of 
over-exquisite  and  rather  priggish  aesthet 


ics." 


Mr.  Donald  Evans  disagrees  with  Mr. 
Bynner  as  to  the  ancestry  of  our  contem 
porary  literature.  He  finds  it  to  be  the 
direct  heir  of  the  movement  of  the  nineties. 
His  own  work  has  usually  been  considered 
as  being  one  of  the  most  radical  contribu- 


THE    EMPIRICISTS      19 

tions  to  modern  poetry;  he,  however,  places 
it  midway  between  the  radical  and  conserva 
tive  currents. 

There  is  undoubtedly  a  new  spirit  in 
American  literature,  but  I  should  dislike 
calling  it  a  "movement,"  because  a  "move 
ment"  is  perforce  self-conscious  and  artifi 
cial,  and  I  believe  this  new  spirit  is  sponta 
neous  and  unconscious.  It  is  best  summed 
up,  I  think,  as  the  "voice  of  youth."  Liter 
ature  today  has  burst  the  shackles  of  middle 
and  old  age  which  controlled  it  absolutely 
during  the  last  half  of  the  last  century.  To 
day  the  writer  wins  a  hearing  in  his  twenties 
while  his  mind  is  still  growing,  expanding, 
and  thus  his  work  has  all  the  charm  of  fresh 
ness,  illusion,  contradiction,  error,  doubt, 
faith,  intolerance,  impatience — in  short,  all 
the  charm  of  youth  itself  with  always  the 
promise  of  finer,  larger  things  to  come. 

The  new  spirit's  most  conspicuous  ideal,  I 
should  say,  is  a  healthy  realism,  a  striving  to 
express  all  sides  of  life,  the  "good  and  the 
bad  and  the  best  and  the  worst." 


20       THE   YOUNG   IDEA 

It  is  the  true  child  of  the  brave  and  bat- 
tlesome  "Yellow  90s"  of  England. 

Naturally,  to  me,  poetry  seems  the  most 
important  current.  Never  has  poetry  had 
a  greater  role  in  letters.  In  the  last  two 
years  almost  as  many  volumes  of  verse  as 
novels  have  been  published. 

My  own  work  is  in  thorough  sympathy 
with  the  new  spirit,  steering,  I  fancy,  a 
rather  middle  course  between  the  radicals 
and  the  conservatives. 

John  Erskine,  Professor  of  English  at 
Columbia  University,  is  widely  known  as  a 
poet  and  critic.  He  draws  an  interesting 
comparison  between  the  attitude  toward  life 
of  our  contemporary  poets  and  the  novelists 
of  the  last  fifty  years.  And  his  criticism  of 
our  literature  is  incisive.  His  essay,  "The 
New  Poetry,"  in  "The  Yale  Review"  for 
January,  1917,  is  a  comprehensive  study  of 
the  spirit  of  recent  American  poetry. 

Here  are  my  answers  to  your  questions: 


THE    EMPIRICISTS      21 

I  believe  a  new  movement  is  showing  itself 
in  poetry  today.  I  find  it  not  only  in  the 
remarkable  output  of  free  verse  and  other 
kinds  of  verse,  but  in  the  growing  attention 
to  American  life  as  a  subject  for  poetry. 
It  seems  to  me  that  the  poets  are  taking  some 
such  interest  in  the  world  about  them  as  the 
novelists  have  been  taking  in  the  last  half 
century,  and  this  new  movement  must  be 
very  largely  an  advantage  to  our  literature. 
The  attention  to  free  verse  I  think  fairly 
negligible — that  is,  I  don't  much  care 
whether  a  man  writes  in  free  verse  or  in  some 
other  form,  provided  he  writes  poetry.  It  is 
perhaps  unfortunate  that  so  much  attention 
has  been  attracted  to  the  form  in  which  verse 
is  written  today,  when  the  question  of  the 
subject  matter  is  so  important.  My  own 
verse,  I  hope,  shows  an  interest  in  what  peo 
ple  are  thinking  and  feeling  today.  It  is 
meant,  at  least,  to  express  the  best  thoughts 
and  feelings  that  I  have.  My  adverse  crit 
icism  of  American  literature  today  would  be 
that  though  there  is  this  improvement  in  the 


22       THE   YOUNG   IDEA 

attention  to  life  about  us,  there  is  still  a  feel 
ing  among  the  writers  that  literature  need 
not  be  particularly  thoughtful  nor  scholarly. 
Too  much  of  our  writing  might  be  dismissed, 
I  think,  with  the  hard  verdict  of  "empty- 
headed  and  shallow-hearted."  The  poets 
who  ever  amounted  to  anything  in  the  world 
shared  deeply  in  the  ideas  and  in  the  feelings 
of  their  time. 

Mr.  Arthur  Davison  Ficke  is  a  poet, 
dramatist  and  critic,  whose  "Sonnets  of  a 
Portrait  Painter"  received  wide  recognition. 
In  this  letter,  and  in  the  essay  which  follows 
it,  is  recorded  the  faith  of  one  who,  although 
writing  in  the  traditional  forms,  has  shared 
deeply  in  the  process  of  liberation  which  he 
describes,  and  is  thoroughly  informed  of  the 
new  spirit  in  poetry. 

The  only  branch  of  American  literature 
about  which  I  feel  competent  to  speak  is 
poetry.  In  that  field  there  has  been  of  late 
so  striking  an  awakening  of  interest  that  im- 


THE    EMPIRICISTS      23 

portant  new  work  may  be  expected.  The 
manifest  eccentricities  and  absurdities  of  the 
"new  schools"  are  certainly  no  worse  than 
the  banalities  and  sentimentalities  of  the  old 
ones ;  in  fact,  the  vigorous  shock  which  some 
of  these  aberrations  have  administered  to  the 
moribund  body  of  poetry  is  distinctly  gal 
vanizing.  Goethe's  words,  used  to  describe 
the  ultra-romantic  excesses  of  French  liter 
ature  in  his  own  day,  apply  accurately  to 
our  present  situation:  "The  extremes  and 
excrescences  will  gradually  disappear;  but 
at  last  this  great  advantage  will  remain — 
besides  a  freer  form,  richer  and  more  diversi 
fied  subjects  will  have  been  attained,  and  no 
object  of  the  broadest  world  and  the  most 
manifold  life  will  be  any  longer  excluded 
as  unpoetical."  We  are  today  experiencing, 
in  poetry  almost  as  markedly  as  in  painting, 
one  of  those  periodic  outbursts  of  unbridled 
life  by  which  alone  can  an  art  be  kept  from 
hardening  into  a  fossil. 

English  poetry  of  today  is  notoriously  the 


24       THE    YOUNG   IDEA 

scene  of  an  opposition  which  to  some  ob 
servers  seems  the  rebellion  of  new  life  against 
sterile  and  petrified  forms,  while  to  others 
it  appears  as  the  menace  of  anarchy  against 
order  and  beauty.  Almost  as  clearly  marked 
as  in  the  economic  world,  the  conservative 
and  the  radical  forces  are  at  work.  The  mak 
ing  of  poetry  is  the  aim  of  both,  but  they 
march  under  two  irreconcilable  banners. 
One  of  these  is  the  very  modern  attempt  to 
find  some  new  and  more  flexible  form  in 
which  can  be  expressed  accurately  the  hon 
est  and  unsentimental  poetry  of  the  modern 
mind;  the  other  is  the  effort  to  invest  the 
raw  vigor  of  our  modernity  with  that  glamor 
of  formal  beauty  which  marks  the  classic 
tradition  of  the  older  poets.  Between  these 
two  camps  a  merry  war  is  waging;  and  it  is 
an  open  question  whether  the  impatience  of 
the  Revolutionists  toward  the  Traditional 
ists,  or  the  distaste  of  the  Traditionalists  for 
the  Revolutionists,  is  the  greater. 

In  any  examination  of  the  Revolutionary 
poetry,  it  is  best  to  put  aside  this  little  quar- 


THE    EMPIRICISTS      25 

rel  and  to  approach  the  new  poems  as  one 
would  a  theatre — willing  to  be  entertained, 
but  not  determined  to  be.  Some  readers  will 
take  up  the  modern  work  with  minds  haunted 
by  the  ghosts  of  poets  who  died  before  the 
new  poets  were  born;  and  these  will  find  it 
difficult  to  regard  the  birth  of  poetry  as  co 
incident  with  the  origin  of  any  modern  cult. 
In  fact,  many  lovers  of  the  old  tradition  ap 
pear  to  have  great  trouble  in  keeping  good- 
tempered  in  the  face  of  some  of  the  claims 
made  by  the  advanced  poets.  It  would  be 
well  if  these'  apoplectic  critics  would  remind 
themselves  that  an  open  mind  is  acceptable 
to  God  and  profitable  to  man.  As  they  con 
front  the  novel  and  sometimes  startling  at 
tempts  of  radical  enthusiasts,  they  might  ad 
vantageously  recall  history  and  be  a  little 
humble.  The  revolts  of  each  rising  genera 
tion  have  always  seemed  to  each  passing  gen 
eration  like  perverse  breaches  of  immutable 
laws;  yet  time  has  often  made  it  clear  that 
it  was  only  against  the  very  mutable  and 
sometimes  stupid  misinterpretation  of  laws 


26       THE   YOUNG   IDEA 

that  the  rebellion  of  the  younger  wills  was 
directed.  Thus  the  pathetic  comedy  goes  on 
from  generation  to  generation;  and  the  old 
past  fights  bitterly  against  the  rising  tide  of 
the  young  future.  May  heaven  spare  us  the 
humiliation  of  acting  so  dull  a  part  in  so 
grotesque  a  drama.  May  we  be  ready  to  wel 
come  all  in  the  new  poetry  that  is  beautiful 
even  though  it  come  dressed  in  an  unfa 
miliar  beauty! 

On  the  other  hand  it  would  be  a  pity  to 
abandon  completely  the  attitude  of  the  skep 
tic  mind — of  the  mind  from  Missouri.  It  is 
not  wholly  a  sign  of  senility  to  demand  evi 
dence  that  the  new  is  good  before  we  discard 
the  old.  Change  is,  indeed,  the  condition  of 
growth,  in  art  as  in  life.  But  not  all  motion 
in  the  arts  is  progress,  nor  are  all  movements 
to  be  regarded  as  Crusades  toward  the  Holy 
Sepulchre.  In  the  arts,  as  in  life,  there  are 
many  blind  alleys,  many  meaningless  expe 
ditions  ;  and  no  one  wants  to  be  tricked  into 
adherence  to  one  of  these.  Faith  in  the  ne 
cessity  of  progress  need  not  drive  the  enthu- 


THE   EMPIRICISTS      27 

siast  to  such  a  pitch  of  desperation  that  he 
joins  every  Coxey's  Army  that  marches 
shouting  through  the  streets. 

Whatever  we  may  think  of  the  new  poetry, 
we  must  perceive  in  it  four  sharply  marked 
elements.  These  are  the  demand  for  com 
plete  metrical  freedom;  the  insistence  on 
hard  actuality  of  images ;  the  adoption  of  an 
attitude  of  humor,  irony,  or  grotesqueness  in 
even  the  most  serious  poems;  and  an  abso 
lute  frankness  and  shamelessness  as  to  the 
content  of  the  poet's  work. 

Of  these  elements  it  is  the  metrical  free 
dom  that  stands  out  most  obviously.  The 
extremists  of  the  new  school  look  with  dis 
trust  on  the  established  verse-forms.  They 
feel  that  the  constraint  of  any  regular  metri 
cal  system  is  an  intolerable  prison  to  the 
spirit  of  the  poet.  Following  the  example 
of  recent  French  poets,  they  demand  that 
the  integrity  of  the  poet's  meaning  be  poured 
into  song  whose  cadences  are  born  solely  of 
the  moment's  emotion  and  are  not  respon 
sible  for  conformity  to  any  recurrent  order 


28       THE   YOUNG   IDEA 

of  rhyme  or  rhythm.  Such  a  theory  pro 
duces  verse  whose  lines  are  of  irregular 
length,  whose  dominant  movement  may 
change  at  any  moment,  and  from  which 
rhyme  is  usually  absent.  At  its  worst  this 
verse  is  an  abomination;  at  its  best  it  is  a 
very  subtle  medium  for  the  expression  of 
certain  kinds  of  feeling. 

As  all  educated  Revolutionists  admit, 
though  the  name  vers  libre  is  new,  the  thing 
itself  is  not.  In  fact,  it  is  a  very  ancient 
thing,  which  has  been  used  admirably  by  the 
most  classic  of  all  the  English  poets,  Milton. 
In  the  Choruses  of  Samson  Agonistes  he 
employs  such  free  verse  as  no  modern  Revo 
lutionary  poet  is  likely  to  surpass.  Hence 
if  we  protest  against  free  verse,  we  set  our 
selves  counter  not  only  to  the  modernists  of 
today  but  also  to  the  classicists  of  yester 
day.  As  Milton  saw,  regular  rhythms  do 
not  fill  every  need.  Not  all  themes  fit  them 
selves  into  conventionalized  sound-patterns. 
Sometimes,  as  in  Samson  Agonistes,  an  ef 
fect  of  peculiar  dryness  and  hardness  is 


THE    EMPIRICISTS      29 

wanted  which  regular  verse  would  be  unable 
to  supply.  Also  there  are  cases  in  which 
life  strikes  the  emotion  of  the  poet  in  broken 
flashes — in  swift  chaotic  fragmentary  per 
ceptions;  and  to  record  these,  free  verse  is 
an  unsurpassed  medium.  For  all  these  rea 
sons  there  is  no  sense  whatever  in  the  popu 
lar  objections  that  have  been  raised  to  the 
free  verse  of  the  modern  poet. 

It  is  only  with  those  who  proclaim  free 
verse  to  be  the  sole  possible  poetic  medium 
that  one  has  a  right  to  quarrel.  There  are 
such  poets ;  and  in  their  attempt  to  create  a 
cult  of  free  verse  they  make  themselves  very 
ridiculous.  Because  the  carpenter  finds  the 
hatchet  useful  for  certain  kinds  of  work  is 
hardly  a  reason  for  throwing  the  saw  out  of 
the  window.  Milton  knew  very  much  better. 
Though  he  used  free  verse  when  he  chose,  he 
employed  the  regular  metres  and  the  son 
net  in  a  manner  that  has  not  been  surpassed. 
Great  artist  that  he  was,  he  adapted  his  me 
dium  to  his  purpose.  He  knew  what  all 
poets  will  be  wise  to  recognize  today;  that 


30       THE   YOUNG   IDEA 

certain  effects  in  poetry  are  wholly  impos 
sible  without  the  use  of  regular  rhythms  and 
rhyme. 

The  reason  for  this  fact  is  derived  from 
the  very  nature  of  the  art.  It  is  based  on 
the  absolute  necessity  of  carrying  the  lulled 
spirit  of  the  reader  on  waves  of  recurrent 
sound  into  a  state  of  suspended  conscious 
ness — a  kind  of  visionary  trance  in  which  the 
mind,  deaf  for  a  moment  to  the  distractions 
of  the  world  around  it,  will  see  singly  and 
solely  the  dream  which  the  poet  puts  be 
fore  it.  The  emotion-heightening,  hypnotic 
power  of  regular  rhythms  and  recurrent 
rhymes  is  in  many  instances  the  whole  basis 
of  that  peculiar  somnambulistic  effect  which 
is  the  special  magic  of  poetry.  Emotion  is 
the  secret  of  it  all;  and  some  emotions  an 
swer  to  the  call  of  rhyme  and  rhythm  as  to  al 
most  nothing  else.  Rhythm  seizes  the  thread 
of  one's  thought  as  might  a  current,  and  in 
tertwines  with  it,  and  draws  it  down  into  re 
mote  subterranean  caverns  of  the  spirit  un- 
visited  by  the  everyday  consciousness. 


THE   EMPIRICISTS      31 

The  sole  debatable  question  that  arises  is: 
How  regular  must  the  rhythm  be  to  pro 
duce  the  desired  trance-like  effect?  When 
the  degree  of  trance  desired  is  not  very  in 
tense,  as  in  poems  that  keep  close  to  the  sur 
face-details  of  observed  reality,  the  beat  of 
the  verse  may  safely  be  reduced  to  a  mini 
mum.  But  when  one  wishes  to  lift  the  reader 
into  regions  of  passionate  ecstasy  and  to 
arouse  the  profoundest  and  most  primal 
emotions,  one  will  have  to  resort  to  a  more 
powerful  stimulus  and  carry  the  reader  far 
ther  away  from  every-day  reality  on  the  flow 
of  these  hypnotic  waves  of  sound.  For  ironic 
comments  on  the  human  comedy  around  us, 
for  pictures  of  the  common  stage  on  which 
we  do  our  little  struttings,  free  verse  is  ad 
mirable;  but  it  will  seldom  serve  to  trans 
port  us  to  the  heights  of  religious  experi 
ence,  or  to  the  depths  of  the  black  night  of 
the  soul,  or  to  the  sun-swept  levels  of  beauty- 
drunken  happiness. 

It  is,  in  fact,  difficult  to  escape  the  feeling 
that  free  verse,  valuable  though  it  is,  is  still 


32       THE   YOUNG   IDEA 

in  some  obscure  way  incomplete  verse — a 
rudimentary  and  not  a  final  art-form.  Many 
poets  will  agree  that  one  resorts  to  free  verse 
chiefly  when  what  one  has  to  say  is  not  com 
pletely  crystallized,  or  when  one's  emotion 
is  not  at  its  most  intense  pitch,  or  when  one 
wishes  to  note  down  a  series  of  impressions 
that  have  not  yet  fully  combined  into  one 
concentrated  pattern.  For  one  case  in  which 
free  verse  has  been  used  as  Milton  used  it, — 

»• 

out  of  deliberate  and  conscious  choice, — 
there  are  a  thousand  cases  in  which  it  has 
been  employed  solely  because  the  writer  had 
not  carried  the  inner  processes  of  compo 
sition  far  enough  to  poetize  his  material  com 
pletely.  When  the  mind  is  a  blaze  of  sudden 
revelation,  and  the  poet's  theme  glows  into 
thorough  transparency  of  white  heat,  he  will 
usually  find  that  what  he  has  to  say  flows 
rapidly  and  perfectly  into  the  smooth  mould 
of  regular  verse-forms ;  but  when  the  inten 
sity  of  his  impulse  is  a  little  lower,  and  all 
kinds  of  comments,  reflections,  minor  ob 
servations,  and  clever  plays  of  word  and 


THE    EMPIRICISTS      33 

thought  are  mixed  with  his  truly  poetical 
material,  then  he  can  give  much  more  com 
plete  and  appropriate  expression  to  his  idea 
in  the  less  intense  rhythms  of  free  verse. 

The  new  poets  have  made  no  mistake  in 
using  free  verse.  Their  only  error  has  been 
in  committing  themselves  to  it  with  too  blind 
an  exclusiveness. 

Beyond  the  matter  of  rhythm  lies  another 
feature  of  the  new  poetry — that  very  inter 
esting  theory  of  writing  called  Imagism. 
The  Imagists  attempt  to  present  to  the 
reader  a  clear,  exact,  sharp  picture  of  ob 
jects  and  episodes;  after  this,  they  allow 
the  reader  himself  to  evoke  from  this  presen 
tation  those  comments,  reflections,  emotions, 
and  overtones  which  form  so  large  a  part 
of  ordinary  poetry.  The  Imagist  would  not 
say  "mournful  waves"  or  "bleak  coast";  he 
would  refuse  to  comment  thus:  he  would 
prefer  "lead-gray  waves"  and  "splintered 
coast."  He  would  attempt  to  find  the  pre 
cise  word  "which  brings  the  effect  of  the 
object  to  the  reader  as  the  writer  saw  it," 


34       THE    YOUNG   IDEA 

and  would  present  his  scene  with  that  im 
personal  interest  in  the  scene  itself  which  is 
the  peculiar  characteristic  of  modern  paint 
ing.  He  would  avoid  all  flamboyant  words, 
all  set  phrases,  and  keep  his  speech  hard, 
spare,  clean-cut,  economical.  He  would  ex 
press  even  the  most  general  ideas,  even  the 
most  abstract  conceptions,  by  means  of  the 
concrete  manner  and  the  definite  embodi 
ment  of  beauty. 

This  theory  has  great  fascination.  The 
practice  of  the  theory  by  the  professed  Im- 
agists  has,  however,  been  disappointing  up 
to  the  present  time.  The  poems  which  fol 
low  are  from  among  those  which  the  Imagists 
themselves  praise.  Here  is  one  of  the  most 
admired  of  Imagist  productions,  Oread,  by 
Mrs.  Richard  Aldington: 

Whirl  up  sea — 

Whirl  your  pointed  pines, 

Splash  your  great  pines 

On  our  rocks, 

Hurl  your  green  over  us, 

Cover  us  with  your  pools  of  fir. 


THE    EMPIRICISTS      35 

There  is,  indeed,  a  certain  vividness  of 
tumult  expressed  in  this  likening  of  the 
wind-tossed  sea  to  a  wind-tossed  pine-forest. 
But  it  seems  attenuated,  over-stressed;  and 
such  a  minutely  treated  theme  for  a  poem, 
after  all!  Surely  a  morbid  fear  of  elabora 
tion  has  impelled  the  writer  to  resort  to  such 
a  mere  adumbration  of  her  thought.  It  sug 
gests  an  unwholesome  'veneration  for  even 
the  most  fragmentary  of  her  perceptions. 
Compare  it  with  any  of  the  short  poems  of 
that  supreme  lyricist,  William  Blake,  and 
observe  how  thin  it  seems. 

Here  is  another  Imagist  poem  by  Mr. 
Ezra  Pound,  called  April;  it  is  almost  mean 
ingless  because  of  this  same  parsimony : 

Three  spirits  came  to  me 

And  drew  me  apart 

To  where  the  olive  boughs 

Lay  stripped  upon  the  ground : 

Pale  carnage  beneath  bright  mist. 

The  principle  of  hard  conciseness  has  here 


36       THE    YOUNG   IDEA 

been  carried  too  far.  It  is  the  method  of 
Japanese  poetry  reduced  to  madness.  But 
here  is  an  incomparably  better  and  perhaps 
a  more  characteristic  specimen  of  Imagism, 
by  Miss  Amy  Lowell;  it  is  called  White  and 
Green. 

Hey!  My  daffodil-crowned, 
Slim  and  without  sandals ! 
As  the  sudden  spurt  of  flame  upon  darkness 
So  my  eyeballs  are  startled  with  you, 
Supple-limbed  youth  among  the  fruit-trees, 
Light  runner  through  tasseled  orchards. 
You  are  an  almond  flower  unsheathed 
Leaping  and  flickering  between  the  budded 
branches. 

Thus  the  Imagist  attempts  to  give  you  a 
clear,  sharp  word-picture  of  the  thing  seen, 
without  making  any  attempt  to  tell  you  what 
emotions  this  thing  evokes  in  him  or  should 
evoke  in  you.  He  hopes,  by  presenting  just 
the  right  details,  to  make  you  do  your  own 
feeling,  and  to  convey  to  you  the  implica- 


THE    EMPIRICISTS      37 

tions  of  the  scene  described  with  a  sharpness 
all  the  greater  because  of  his  withholding  of 
his  own  comments.  Of  course,  the  Imagist 
is  not  unique  in  this  aim.  There  is  a  perfect 
example  of  Imagism  in  Burns'  line : 

The  white  moon  is  setting  behind  the  white 
wave, 

and  in  Keats' : 

The  sedge  is  withered  by  the  lake 
And  no  birds  sing. 

In  the  words  of  these  poets,  however,  the 
Imagistic  passages  stand  in  intelligible  rela 
tion  to  greater  wholes ;  they  are  merely  the 
bits  out  of  which  the  artist  composes  his  wide 
mosaic.  The  real  Imagists,  on  the  other 
hand,  too  often  forget  the  whole  for  the  part; 
they  too  often  are  content  to  put  down  vivid 
little  trifles  as  if  they  were  completed  pic 
tures.  Many  Imagist  poems  are  merely 
such  fragmentary  bits  of  color,  such  mo 
mentary  sketches,  as  a  great  artist  puts 


38       THE    YOUNG   IDEA 

down  in  his  note-book  for  later  use  in  a 
larger  composition. 

There  is  a  third  element  very  strikingly 
present  in  the  new  poetry:  this  is  its  revolt 
against  sweetness  and  prettiness.  It  appears 
sometimes  as  brutality,  sometimes  as  irony, 
sometimes  as  grotesqueness.  As  one  might 
stamp,  swearing  furiously,  out  of  some  over- 
scented  boudoir, — so  many  of  the  Revolu 
tionary  poets  give  expression  to  their  con 
tempt  for  the  softness  and  sugariness  of  the 
older  poetry.  This  is  not  an  altogether  new 
phenomenon;  it  has  occurred  before  in  all 
the  arts  as  a  sign  of  vigor  and  fresh  life.  It 
offends  the  godly,  but  it  wakes  them  up.  It 
is  one  of  the  healthiest  signs  in  our  modern 
work.  Sometimes  it  takes  a  less  violent 
form,  as  it  did  in  the  work  of  a  poet  who 
was  in  other  respects  a  Revolutionist, — 
Rupert  Brooke, — and  becomes  an  insistence 
on  the  ugly,  the  humiliating,  the  repulsive 
aspects  of  life.  Tired  of  high-flown  idealiza 
tions  and  hothouse  bouquets,  Brooke  shows 
us  Helen  of  Troy  in  old  age. 


THE   EMPIRICISTS      39 

a  scold 

Haggard  with  virtue. 

Oft  she  weeps  gummy-eyed  and  impotent; 
Her  dry  shanks  twitch  at  Paris'  mumbled 
name. 

This  kind  of  thing  has  its  tonic  value;  it  is 
the  other  half  of  the  story,  the  dark  of  the 
moon.  And  though  it  would  be  a  pity  if  the 
vigor  of  the  new  movement  spent  itself 
wholly  in  grotesques  of  this  variety,  they 
show  a  healthy  skepticism,  a  healthy  con 
tempt  for  the  humiliating  position  of  the 
human  animal;  and  their  place  is  just  as 
legitimate  as  is  that  of  the  gargoyles  grin 
ning  down  from  cathedral  buttresses. 

Nevertheless,  some  critics  have  abused  Mr. 
Edgar  Lee  Masters  for  the  gloom  and  sav 
agery  of  his  Spoon  River  portraits ;  and  the 
other  day  a  certain  reviewer  took  a  book  to 
task  because  it  was  not  "heartening,"  and 
because  the  dramatis  personas  of  the  lyrics 
were  all  "wise  and  bitter  and  weary  and  gen 
erally  disillusioned  and  disillusionizing."  As 


40       THE   YOUNG   IDEA 

if  it  were  necessary  for  a  poet  to  write  with 
a  pie-smile  on  his  face!  One  writes  of  life 
as  one  sees  it;  and  the  new  writers,  impa 
tient  with  the  shallow  optimism  of 

God's  in  his  heaven, 

All's  right  with  the  world, 

are  trying  to  set  down  their  sense  of  the 
confusions  and  degradations  and  bafflements 
of  life,  as  well  as  of  its  peaks  in  Darien.  Mr. 
Masters  or  Mr.  Carl  Sandburg  or  Mr.  Ed 
win  Arlington  Robinson  would  produce  a 
fine  absurdity,  indeed,  if  they  attempted  to 
write  with  that  confident  optimism  which  is 
perfectly  natural  to  Mr.  Vachel  Lindsay, 
and  which  is  the  true  and  proper  way  for 
Mr.  Lindsay  to  write.  But  Mr.  Lindsay's 
work  would  have  little  ralue  if  its  cheerful 
ness  were  its  only  or  its  finest  quality. 

This  leads  one  to  the  last  characteristic  of 
the  new  poetry:  its  intellectual  frankness. 
Until  one  stops  to  think  about  it,  one  does 
not  realize  how  extensive  the  change  in  this 


THE    EMPIRICISTS      41 

matter  has  been.  Fifty  years  ago  the  tra 
dition  of  English  poetry  was  simply  over 
grown  with  a  thicket  of  Victorian  pruderies 
and  reticences.  The  hypocritical  sentiment 
ality  of  Tennyson's  Arthurian  ideal  lay  upon 
Mid- Victorian  English  like  a  blight;  and 
few  writers  except  Swinburne,  who  cared 
not  a  fig  for  devil,  man,  or  Queen  Victoria, 
dared  make  beauty  out  of  the  soul's  or  the 
body's  nakedness.  Now  all  this  is  past.  To 
day  it  is  possible  for  the  sincere  artist  in 
verse  to  write  of  absolutely  anything.  He 
is  no  longer  limited  to  that  small  seg 
ment  of  life  which  might  have  been  con 
sidered  proper  for  the!  sight  of  the  Mid- Vic 
torian  young  lady.  He  has  once  more  the 
virile  freedom  of  the  Elizabethans,  and  may 
without  fear  or  shame  depict  whatsoever 
aspect  of  life  seems  to  his  eyes  significant  or 
curious  or  beautiful. 

In  future  years  it  will  doubtless  not  be 
possible  for  the  dispassionate  critic  to  take 
the  new  poetry  quite  as  seriously  as,  today, 
it  takes  itself.  Such  an  observer  may  grow 


42       THE   tYOUNG   IDEA 

a  little  bewildered  and  even  amused  as  he 
surveys  our  Schools  and  Movements — the 
Imagists  and  Vorticists  and  Spectricists  and 
Patagonians  and  a  Choric  School,  and 
Heaven  only  knows  how  many  others.  He 
will  perhaps  wonder  wherein  the  revolution 
ary  element  of  all  these  Revolutions  lay,  for 
he  will  see  clearly  that  all  the  elements  of 
our  new  poetry  are  in  fact  very  old  elements. 
But  if  he  stops  there,  he  will  be  a  very  bad 
critic  indeed. 

Something  has  really  happened  to  us.  The 
effort  toward  freedom  from  dead  conven 
tions,  displayed  in  the  new  poetry,  has  a 
significance  greater  than  any  actual  accom 
plishment  that  the  movement  has  so  far  pro 
duced.  There  is  a  genuine  spiritual  liber 
ation  behind  even  the  most  fantastic  of  the 
new  poems,  and  an  honest  effort  to  explore, 
to  invent,  to  widen  the  boundaries  of  the  art. 
Though  the  technical  results  have  been  so 
far  negligible,  the  moral  results  have  been 
large.  Today  men  are  writing  more  hon 
estly,  more  spontaneously,  more  vigorously, 


THE    EMPIRICISTS      43 

than  at  any  time  during  the  last  quarter- 
century;  they  are  writing  joyfully  and 
shamelessly;  they  recognize  no  authority  that 
cannot  justify  itself,  no  dogmas  that  are  not 
lighted  by  living  faith.  They  are  trying  to 
express  real  feelings  and  to  devise  patterns 
of  verse  appropriate  to  this  expression. 

A  few  years  ago,  men  with  no  deep  power 
over  either  thought  or  form  were  busily  fill 
ing  the  magazines  with  sweet  characterless 
rubbish.  Since  the  death  of  the  great  Vic 
torian  poets,  they  had  used  the  whole  Ten- 
nysonian  machinery  in  a  facile,  spiritless, 
over-ornamented  way,  without  any  of  that 
underlying  greatness  of  spirit  which  made 
this  rather  absurd  machinery  forgivable  in 
the  hands  of  Tennyson.  People  had  come 
to  think  that  regular  rhythms,  rhymes,  and 
a  good  deal  of  talk  about  "azure  argosies" 
and  "hillside  vernal"  and  "argent  pano 
plies"  and  "light  supernal"  constituted  the 
badge  of  the  modern  poet;  and  that  fine 
poetry  had  really  died  with  Queen  Victoria. 

Then  came  the  Revolution.    It  came  as  a 


44       THE   YOUNG   IDEA 

part  of  that  general  revolution  which  has 
been  working  upheaval  in  all  the  arts.  Our 
day  has  seen  every  artist,  be  he  musician, 
painter,  sculptor,  or  poet,  forced  to  take 
stock  of  his  soul's  goods  and  to  look  around 
him  with  fresh  eyes.  We  have  seen  in  music 
the  growth  of  a  new  order  of  composition — 
an  order  in  which  the  formal  patterns  of 
Mozart  and  Beethoven  seem  shattered  into 
strange  discontinuous  tones,  imperfect  satis 
factions  of  the  waiting  ear,  discords  as  haunt 
ing  as  they  are  unexpected.  In  the  field  of 
painting,  men  whom  we  can  no  longer  dis 
miss  with  a  nod  as  charlatans, — men  like 
Cezanne  and  Matisse, — have  been  abandon 
ing  the  hard-won  classic  perfection  of  Titian 
and  Raphael,  and  have  been  insisting  that 
the  painter  must  return  to  the  freshness  and 
integrity  of  his  own  emotional  perception 
of  nature,  in  all  its  starkness  and  crudity. 

Even  so  in  poetry,  this  revolution  has 
worked  in  salutary  ways.  It  shattered  the 
illusion  that  all  the  poets  were  dead,  and 
that  the  pseudo-Tennysonian  poetry  of  the 


THE    EMPIRICISTS      45 

magazines  remained  as  their  sole  relique  on 
earth.  The  Revolutionists  demanded  true 
feeling  and  appropriate  expression  instead 
of  empty  rhetoric.  They  assaulted  the  great. 
They  tried  preposterous  experiments.  They 
made  the  world  feel  that  there  was,  after 
all,  dynamite  and  a  volcano  at  the  heart  of 
poetry.  For  this,  let  us  give  them  profound 
thanks. 

But  after  we  have  given  them  this,  their 
intensity  of  effort  need  not  make  us  feel  that 
the  stars  of  our  youth  have  gone  out.  These 
insurgencies  have  not  touched  the  glory  of 
Milton  or  Shelley  or  Shakespeare.  The  old 
beauty  remains  beautiful,  though  it  does  not 
flatter  us  with  the  sense  that  we  have  dis 
covered  its  secret  for  the  first  time  today; 
and  the  principles  of  aesthetic  creation  en 
dure  precisely  as  they  were  in  the  days  of 
King  David  the  Psalmist.  In  the  arts,  lib 
erty  is  not  all,  nor  all-important.  There  is 
no  virtue  in  just  the  free  and  untrammeled 
expression  of  our  personalities,  in  free  verse 
or  any  other  verse ;  the  root  of  the  matter  is 


46       THE   YOUNG   IDEA 

to  discover  and  use  that  medium,  that  pat 
tern  and  rhythm,  into  which  our  personal 
emotion  can  be  poured  and  there  take  on  the 
lineaments  of  an  impersonal  and  intelligible 
beauty.  It  is  of  very  little  consequence  if 
you  or  I  cry  out  our  hearts;  it  is  of  great 
consequence  if  we  can  turn  our  hearts'  cry 
into  the  measures  of  a  perfect  song.  In  any 
art,  nothing  ultimately  matters  but  the 
aesthetic  element;  and  the  aesthetic  element 
is  not  necessarily  inherent  in  even  the  most 
sincere  and  spontaneous  outpouring  of  feel 
ing.  Liberty  from  formal  restraint  is  there 
fore  worthless  unless  it  leads  to  some  further 
and  finer  discovery  of  formal  law.  The  chief 
danger  of  the  new  poetry  is  that  it  often 
seems  in  its  practice  to  forget  this  positively 
platitudinous  axiom.  Form! — it  is  every 
thing.  Not  in  the  stupid  academic  sense  of 
precedented  models,  but  in  the  sense  of  that 
fine  harmony  between  the  artist's  meaning 
and  his  manner  which  is  the  parallel  of  those 
rare  human  moments  when  there  is  achieved 
a  real  concordance  of  body  and  soul. 


THE    EMPIRICISTS      47 

Mr.  Vachel  Lindsay  was  among  the  van 
guard  of  the  prophets  of  revolt  in  our  poetry. 
His  "Adventures  While  Preaching  the  Gos 
pel  of  Beauty,"  a  record  of  his  vagabond 
journey  through  the  Middle  West,  records 
his  faith  in  the  influence  of  poetry  upon  the 
common  man,  a  faith  which  he  has  put  to  the 
test  of  proof. 

He  says:  There  is  a  wave  of  interest  in 
verse  going  across  the  country.  America  is 
beginning  to  professionalize,  institutionalize 
and  nationalize  a  new  group  of  laureates. 

The  Century  Magazine  for  March,  1916, 
said:  "There  are  one  hundred  poets  in  Amer 
ica  today,  excellent  craftsmen,  vivid  adven 
turers,  known  and  unknown." 

Some  of  these  people  have  been  writing 
for  a  generation.  The  public,  however,  re 
fused  until  today  to  read  any  of  their  books. 
Only  one  excuse  was  offered.  The  verse 
of  these  poets  was  not  "great." 

It  was  a  particularly  cruel  and  unreason 
able  standard,  when  applied  to  the  village 


48       THE    YOUNG   IDEA 

poet.  His  rhyme  was  sometimes  printed  by 
the  most  fastidious  magazines.  That  should 
have  been  enough  for  a  standing  in  the  home 
town.  Certainly  it  was  not  required  of  the 
young  fellow  with  a  law  school  education 
that  he  have  ten  years  of  emenince  as  Chief 
Justice  of  the  Supreme  Court  before  he  be 
trusted  with  the  local  legal  business.  Yet 
many  of  the  hundred  who  are  now  emerging 
were  these  village  poets,  hung,  drawn  and 
quartered  by  the  Christian  Endeavor  So 
ciety,  the  Y.  M.  C.  A.,  the  Labor  Union  and 
the  Country  Club  alike,  because,  as  it  was 
implied,  they  could  not  prove  themselves 
Homer,  Shakespeare,  Milton  and  Whitman 
combined. 

But  the  real  reason  of  the  taboo  was  that 
the  tyrannous  majorities  disliked  all  poetry. 
There  were  two  causes  for  this.  First: 
American  fidgits.  Second:  the  way  verse 
was  taught  in  the  public  schools  of  the  last 
generation.  The  teachers  did  not  many  of 
them  love  the  art.  It  was  the  custom  to  use 
it  as  a  grindstone,  as  a  sharpener  of  the  wits* 


THE    EMPIRICISTS      49 

This  gift  of  the  gods,  whose  name  for  little 
children  should  have  been  as  springtime  and 
wildflowers,  became  in  the  eyes  of  the  Amer 
ican  babies  a  mysterious  rack  on  which  the 
mind  was  tortured.  Every  poem  was  trans 
formed  into  a  prose  exercise  in  reasoning  or 
an  experiment  in  scanning.  The  child  was 
always  taught  to  read  past  the  rhyme  and 
ignore  it.  He  was  shown  the  alleged  won 
derful  trick  of  stopping  for  breath  at  the 
middle  of  the  line,  and  reading  past  the 
rhyme  as  fast  as  possible.  Yet,  generally 
speaking,  in  every  well-read  poem  there 
should  be  as  long  a  pause  as  is  given  for  a 
comma,  wherever  there  is  a  rhyme.  The 
child  who  singsonged  the  poem  was  the  mar 
tyr  of  poetry.  He  was  absolutely  right  and 
he  was  reproved  for  it. 

The  only  poems  allowed  to  penetrate  the 
baby  souls  of  that  generation  were  the  class 
ics  of  the  playground,  "London  Bridge  Is 
Falling  Down,"  "King  William  Was  King 
James'  Son,"  and  "As  We  Go  Round  the 
Mulberry  Bush,"  sung  in  concert  and  acted 


50      THE   YOUNG   IDEA 

by  sturdy  volunteers  at  recess.  And  no  one 
in  America  appeared  to  know  that  was 
poetry.  Poetry  was  something  to  pull  a 
long  face  over,  and  give  the  name  of  the 
meter. 

The  village  poet  should  see  that  the  entire 
teaching  of  verse  in  the  nearest  public  school 
be  related  as  closely  as  possible  to  "London 
Bridge,"  "King  William,"  and  the  "Mul 
berry  Bush,"  and  the  child  encouraged  to 
sing-song  his  favorite  poems  with  growing 
elaboration  through  the  years.  The  village 
poet  will  find  this  generation  of  teachers 
quite  willing  to  co-operate.  Let  the  chil 
dren  go  deeply  into  the  cadences  of  "Hia 
watha,"  Poe's  "Bells,"  and  "Horatius  at  the 
Bridge"  and  "How  They  Brought  the  Good 
News  from  Ghent  to  Aix,"  and,  if  possible, 
make  them  into  their  own  folk  dances.  I 
have  found  this  very  easy  to  do  with  chil 
dren  from  six  to  eighteen,  and,  of  course, 
with  older  students. 

The  college  student  should  go  deeply  into 
the  mystery  of  unrhymed  melodies,  and 


THE    EMPIRICISTS      51 

evolve  any  procedure  that  will  make  the 
printed  rhythms  real.  The  new  free  verse 
requires  an  ear  that  is  first  elaborately 
trained  in  conventional  rhythms.  The  people 
that  like  it  best  are  apt  to  be  those  who  love 
the  old  poets. 

.Young  physicians  and  lawyers  have  empty 
offices  the  first  few  years,  sometimes  many 
years,  and  the  versifier  need  not  expect  an 
easier  time.  Whatever  the  village  poet's 
ostensible  profession,  school  teacher,  editor, 
ditch-digger,  let  him  fight  for  local  recog 
nition  as  a  minstrel,  in  any  dignified  way, 
and  not  wait  for  a  hearing  to  come  to  him. 

And,  like  the  preacher,  let  the  versifier 
learn  to  vocalize  his  message.  Young  di 
vines,  delivering  their  first  sermons,  act  as 
poets  generally  do  all  their  lives  when  read 
ing  their  works.  Every  one  gives  a  sigh  of 
relief  when  the  exercises  are  over.  But  here 
is  a  difference.  The  preacher  tries  again, 
because  society  expects  it  of  him,  and  he  ex 
pects  it  of  himself.  The  most  brilliant  poets 
go  on  whispering  forever,  claiming  special 


52       THE    YOUNG   IDEA 

privileges,  while  there  is  scarcely  a  cross 
roads  pastor  or  small  town  lawyer  of  mid 
dle  age  but  can  make  a  fairly  acceptable 
presentation  of  such  a  message  as  he  has,  and 
hold  three  hundred  with  reasonable  com 
mand. 

"Getting  into  the  magazines"  is  a  diploma 
for  which  the  bard  should  be  thankful.  It 
is  worth  striving  for.  But  though  the  poets 
have  been  in  the  magazines  all  these  years, 
no  one  for  a  generation  has,  as  it  were,  read 
the  diploma.  Or,  to  put  it  another  way, 
the  accepted  verses  became  end-page  orna 
ments,  by  no  means  taken  with  the  same  hu 
man  interest  as  the  prose  before  or  after. 
And  as  to  remembering  the  name  or  style 
of  a  poet  from  one  month  to  the  next,  that 
was  incredible.  Even  yet  the  typical  news 
stand  magazines  list  their  contributing  prose 
writers  on  the  back  of  flaming  colors,  and 
are  discretely  omitting  their  rhymers. 

But  Harriet  Munroe,  Edward  J.  Wheeler, 
William  Stanley  Braithwaite,  Jessie  B. 
Rittenhouse,  Alice  Corbin  Henderson,  Louis 


THE    EMPIRICISTS      53 

Untermeyer,  Alfred  Kreymborg,  Margaret 
Anderson,  Max  Eastman,  Lewellyn  Jones, 
Joyce  Kilmer,  William  Marion  Reedy, 
Francis  Hackett,  with  their  special  publica 
tions,  reviews,  magazines,  anthologies,  social 
groups  or  organized  societies  have  served  in 
their  various  ways  to  lift  the  American  poets 
out  of  the  class  of  mere  diploma-getters, 
stop-gaps,  end-page  decorators.  Differing 
in  a  legion  of  amazing  ways,  of  all  schools 
of  political  and  religious  thought,  these 
critics  agree  in  a  passion  for  verse.  They 
have  distributed  living  laurels  of  late,  as 
well  as  some  limp  laurels.  Let  those  who 
have  hopes  for  the  American  soul,  do  them 
honor  for  this  crusade. 

Now  the  lately-laurelled  are  in  a  sea  of 
endless  technical  discussion  as  to  what  the 
pattern  of  a  poem  should  be.  It  is  as  dreary 
as  the  ancient  scanning  of  the  ward-school 
pedagogues.  But  no  one  is  attempting  to 
work  out  what  is  more  important;  the  pat 
tern  of  daily  life  for  the  American  singer. 
This  is  the  thing  the  village  poets  must  do. 


54       THE   YOUNG   IDEA 

Certainly  they  may  need  Bohemia  for  a  sea 
son.  They  may  find  Art  allies  worth  while 
in  Greenwich  Village,  that  new  East  Au 
rora,  with  its  many  new  would-be  Elbert 
Hubbards. 

But  it  does  not  behoove  the  true  Jeffer- 
sonian  American  to  break  his  home-ties  for 
ever  and  stew  away  to  nothing  in  the  far 
country  simply  because  in  his  early  youth 
some  one  in  authority  praised  one  of  his 
songs. 

Let  the  lately-crowned  member  of  our 
poetical  one  hundred  accept  his  dead  diplo 
mas  and  his  living  laurels  as  well.  Let  his 
henchmen  insist  to  his  neighbors  that  he  is  a 
verse-designer  duly  certified  by  both  the 
official  and  the  inspired  authorities,  and  then 
let  him  set  out  to  make  over  the  spirit  of 
his  town. 

Our  most  outstanding  examples  of  the 
local  poet  in  the  present  decade  are  the  late 
James  Whitcomb  Kiley,  who  has  given  In 
diana  a  soul,  Edgar  Lee  Masters,  laureate 
of  all  down-state  Illinois,  Carl  Sandburg, 


THE   EMPIRICISTS      55 

laureate  of  Chicago,  Robert  Frost,  laureate 
of  all  north  of  Boston. 

There  are  too  many  poets  in  Greenwich 
Village.  But  there  is  room  indeed  for  one 
hundred  poets,  properly  distributed.  That 
is  but  one  for  each  million  of  inhabitants. 
A  potential  audience  of  a  million  should  be 
spur  enough  for  any  man.  It  seems  to  me 
some  of  our  young  fellows  are  rather  baby 
ish,  the  way  they  huddle  together.  Why 
cannot  they  stand  out  alone  and  take  the 
real  winds  of  America,  instead  of  snuggling 
in  an  imitation  Latin  quarter?  There  is 
nothing  in  the  cornfields  to  frighten  real 
men.  It  is  not  all  important  that  America 
have  "Immortal  Bards."  Poetic  immortal 
ity  is  an  utterly  false  aspiration  for  the  critic 
to  awaken  or  for  the  unfortunate  rhymer  to 
hug  to  his  breast.  It  is  as  bad  as  newspaper 
notoriety,  as  a  motive. 

And  it  is  still  more  absurd,  when  the  poet 
does  return  to  the  village,  for  utterly  un 
known  labor  leaders,  politicians,  merchants 
or  bankers  to  insist  that  their  local  singer 


56       THE    YOUNG   IDEA 

prove  that  he  has  won  the  admiration  of  the 
unborn  of  the  whole  wide  world  for  all  the 
ages  to  come,  before  he  is  privileged  to  sing 
the  local  songs.  The  village  poet,  the  home 
town  poet,  should  rather  aspire  to  an  old- 
age  veteranship,  a  standing  that  will  count 
with  his  friends  and  provoke  his  enemies, 
we  will  say,  at  his  seventieth  birthday.  He 
should  be  equal  parts  William  Allen  White, 
Eugene  V.  Debs  and  the  nightingale.  If  he 
desires  immortality,  let  it  be  among  the  chil 
dren  of  his  personal  friends  in  his  home 
town.  I  hope  any  reader  of  the  Mirror  who 
knows  a  poet  that  needs  this  message  will 
not  hesitate  to  clip  it  out  and  send  it  to  him. 

Miss  Harriet  Munroe  is  the  editor  of 
"Poetry,  a  Magazine  of  Verse."  A  poet  of 
distinction  herself,  she  has  made  the  maga 
zine  a  center  for  the  new  movement  in  the 
art  whose  influence  in  bringing  the  work  of 
the  new  poets  to  the  attention  of  the  public 
can  hardly  be  overestimated.  As  her  con 
tribution  to  the  discussion,  she  has  chosen 
these  editorials  from  the  magazine. 


THE    EMPIRICISTS      57 

I  am  moved  sometimes  to  wonder  at  the 
narrowness  of  the  field  accorded  to  the  poet 
of  conservative  public  taste,  as  compared 
with  the  freer  range  granted  today,  as  a 
matter  of  course,  to  other  artists. 

The  architect  must  pass  with  ease  from 
cottage  to  cathedral,  from  the  village  shop  to 
the  skyscraper,  and  in  doing  so  he  may  take 
his  choice  of  classic,  renaissance,  gothic,  se 
cession,  or  catch-as-catch-can.  The  painter 
may  paint  figures,  landscapes,  marines,  his 
tories,  mysteries,  in  any  style  that  pleases 
him,  from  Rembrandt  to  Cezanne,  from  Ci- 
mabue  to  Kandinsky.  Even  the  sculptor, 
despite  the  bulk  and  hardness  of  his  medium, 
has  the  freedom  of  marble,  bronze,  terra 
cotta,  wax,  wood,  and  many  other  sub 
stances,  and  of  all  styles  from  the  Chou  dy 
nasty  to  the  futuristic  dream  in  his  own  soul. 
And  the  musician— but  his  range  is  the 
widest  of  all:  he  may  compose  song  or  sym 
phony,  fugue  or  rhapsody,  opera,  fantasia 
or  extravaganza;  and  to  express  all  the  fine 
harmonies  or  riotous  discords  of  his  dream 


58       THE    "YOUNG    IDEA 

he  may  call  on  hundreds  of  cunning  instru 
ments,  singly  or  in  miraculous  unison,  and 
on  the  human  voice  as  well,  and  compel  them 
to  reveal  him,  whether  he  be  Bach  or  De- 
hussy,  Wagner  or  Schoenberg. 

And  all  these  various  extremes  in  these 
various  arts  the  public  admits  to  its  streets 
and  gardens,  its  theatres  and  concert  halls, 
its  museums  and  (exhibitions.  Indeed,  the 
more  violent  the  extreme,  the  more  eagerly 
do  we  flock  to  see  or  hear,  the  more  firmly 
do  we  believe  that  we  must  see  or  hear  in 
order  to  bring  our  culture,  or  kultur,  up  to 
date  and  meet  the  cannonading  future  with 
a  quiet  mind. 

But  the  poet,  the  English-writing  poet  of 
today — what  does  his  potentially  vast  public 
expect  of  him?  His  language  circles  the 
globe ;  his  era  is  cosmopolitan,  enormous,  full 
of  newly  released  forces,  of  newly  emerging 
ideas.  He  lives  in  a  world  which  is  wound 
in  a  net  of  rails  and  wires,  of  sea-ways  and 
air-ways,  a  world  of  far  kinships  and  inhu 
man  wars,  of  intolerable  poverty  and 


THE    EMPIRICISTS      59 

luxury,  incredible  fellowships  and  isolations. 

To  express  the  unprecedented  magnifi 
cence  of  this  modern  era,  the  unprecedented 
emotion  of  this  changing  world — to  tell  the 
"tale  of  the  tribe"  to  the  future,  and  thereby 
make  the  future  as  Homer  and  Dante  and 
Shakespeare  have  made  us,  the  poet  has  but 
one  instrument — words.  To  use  this  in 
strument  adequately,  to  make  it  resound  far 
and  wide  to  the  heights  and  depths  of  the 
human  spirit,  the  poet  has  need  of  the  utmost 
freedom  and  the  utmost  sympathy.  He 
needs  as  large  and  as  eager  an  audience  as 
any  confrere  in  the  other  arts,  an  audience 
giving  him  the  widest  liberty  of  experience 
in  his  effort  to  enrich  his  instrument,  broaden 
its  range,  and  break  down  the  technical  bar 
riers  between  his  art  and  the  far-flung  mod 
ern  tribes  whom  it  must  address. 

Yet,  instead  of  such  a  co-operating  public, 
what  does  he  find?  He  finds  an  indifferent 
public,  loath  to  listen  at  all,  but  demanding, 
if  it  does  listen,  close  observance  of  the  well- 
worn  formulae  of  rhymes  and  iambs  which 


60       THE    YOUNG   IDEA 

Chaucer  imported  from  France  in  his  scorn 
of  the  Anglo-Saxon  tradition.  If  a  poet  ven 
tures  out  of  this  classic  park  he  is  at  once 
suspect ;  the  public  gives  him  up  as  mentally 
afflicted  and  leaves  the  paragraphers  to  diag 
nose  his  malady.  And  even  the  more  con 
servative  of  his  fellow-poets  question  his 
right  to  batter  down  sacred  walls. 

Now,  Poetry  has  frankly  tried  to  widen 
the  poet's  range,  to  question  conventional 
barriers,  whether  technical  or  spiritual,  in 
herited  from  the  past,  and  help  to  bring  the 
modern  poet  face  to  face  with  the  modern 
world.  We  have  printed  not  only  odes  and 
sonnets,  blank  verse  dramas  and  rhymed 
pentameter  narratives,  but  imagistic  songs, 
futuristic  fugues,  fantasies  in  vers  libre, 
rhapsodies  in  polyphonic  prose — any  dash 
for  freedom  which  seemed  to  have  life  and 
hope  in  it — a  fervor  for  movement  and  the 
beauty  of  open  spaces — even  if  the  goal  was 
vague  and  remote,  or  quite  unattainable  in 
the  distance. 

And  probably  we  shall  go  on  in  this  reck- 


THE    EMPIRICISTS      61 

less  course,  whether  the  public  gathers  in 
great  numbers  or  not.  A  certain  public — 
small,  perhaps,  but  choice — is  gathering;  of 
that  we  receive  indisputable  evidence  every 
day.  Even  that  satirical  newspaper  editor 
who  turns  one  of  our  fugues  upside  down,  or 
that  other  who  gaily  parodies  imagism,  or 
that  graver  one  who  points  at  us  the  finger 
of  scorn — all  these  are  more  or  less  con 
sciously  our  friends,  for  they  are  helping  the 
public  to  WAKE  UP,  to  observe  that 
something,  through  whatever  illusions  and 
extravagances,  is  going  on,  that  poetry  is  not 
a  dead  art,  but  a  living  one,  and  that  the 
poet  of  today,  like  the  liberator  of  long  ago, 
WILL  BE  HEARD. 

The  Book  and  Play  Club  had  an  "editors' 
night"  last  month,  when  spokesmen  for  vari 
ous  Chicago  weeklies  and  monthlies  uttered 
their  pleas  and  plaints.  It  was  mostly  the 
same  story — the  difficulty  of  finding  and 
winning  over  a  public  for  art,  for  ideas,  while 
the  great,  headlong,  tolerant,  American 
crowd  huddles  like  sheep  in  the  droves  of  the 


62       THE   YOUNG   IDEA 

commercial  exploiters  of  this  or  that  feature 
or  fashion,  this  or  that  impulse  or  interest 
of  the  hour. 

Also  it  was  a  confession  of  motives  and 
feelings.  Mr.  Alexander  Kahn  loved  the 
Little  Review  like  a  sweetheart,  the  editor 
of  The  Dial  admitted  his  aversion  from  its 
conventionality,  and  one  and  all  longed  for 
that  free  and  enlightened  weekly  which  shall 
outrank  all  other  papers  of  whatever  time 
or  clime,  and  make  Chicago  the  centre  of 
the  earth.  Incidentally,  there  were  more 
personal  confessions.  Mr.  Edgar  Lee  Mas 
ters,  for  example,  told  how  the  Spoon  River 
'Anthology  was  conceived  nearly  a  year  ago, 
when  his  mind,  already  shaken  out  of  certain 
literary  prejudices  by  the  reading  in  Poetry 
of  much  free  verse,  especially  that  of  Mr. 
Carl  Sandburg,  was  spurred  to  more  active 
radicalism  through  a  friendship  with  that 
iconoclastic  champion  of  free  speech,  free 
form,  free  art — freedom  of  the  soul.  At  this 
acknowledgment  that  Poetry  had  furnished 
the  spark  which  kindled  a  poet's  soul  to 


THE    EMPIRICISTS      63 

living  flame,  and  burned  out  of  it  the  dry 
refuse  of  formalism,  this  editor,  in  her 
corner,  felt  a  thrill  of  pride,  and  a  sudden 
warmth  of  unalterable  conviction  that,  what 
ever  may  happen  to  the  magazine  now  or 
later,  its  work  can  never  be  counted  vain. 

After  Poetry,  The  Little  Review,  The 
Dial.,  Drama,  etc.,  had  confessed  bitter  strug 
gles  to  keep  above  water,  we  were  patted 
on  the  head  and  condescendingly  put  in  our 
place  as  "uplift  magazines"  by  one  of  the 
numerous  popular  monthlies  which,  though 
no  one  ever  hears  of  them,  go  out  from  Chi 
cago  to  eager  millions.  "We  don't  turn  over 
our  hands  to  get  subscribers,"  said  the  charm 
ingly  complacent  editor,  "yet  nothing  can 
stop  them;  after  two  brief  years  of  life  we 
have  two  hundred  thousand — thirty  thou 
sand  new  ones  since  October.  I  fear  these 
well-meaning  neighbors  of  mine  don't  give 
you  what  you  want." 

As  the  audience  laughed  the  mind  of  at 
least  one  editor  transformed  it,  and  multi 
plied  it  by  millions,  until  it  included  the  vast 


64       THE    YOUNG   IDEA 

constituency  of  all  those  incredibly  popular 
magazines.  I  saw  as  in  a  Piers  Ploughman 
vision  the  myriads  of  "new  readers"  stretch 
ing  from  sea  to  sea — the  huge,  easy-going 
American  public  following  trampled  roads, 
gulping  down  pre-digested  foods,  suspicious 
always  of  ideas,  of  torches,  of  climbing  feet, 
of  singing  voices — a  public  which  does  not 
stone  its  prophets,  finding  it  more  effective 
to  ignore  them. 

But,  strangely  enough,  the  vision  brought, 
instead  of  bitterness,  a  deep  warming  of  the 
heart.  Is  it  not  the  same  old  crowd  that 
Langland  saw — the  struggling,  suffering 
toilers  who  starve  in  body  and  mind,  who 
clutch  at  any  straw  of  comfort  and  follow 
any  casual  cry,  who  dream  deep  dreams 
which  they  dare  not  admit  and  cannot  ex 
press,  who  grope  for  beauty  and  truth 
through  tinsel  trickeries  and  smug  falsities? 
Are  not  the  prophets  one  with  them  because 
the  prophets  are  doing  the  same  thing1 — 
plunging  with  such  lights  as  they  have  into 
the  darkness  ?  Indeed,  only  the  prophets  are 


THE    EMPIRICISTS      65 

aware  of  what  all  are  doing,  aware  of  the 
uncharted  immensities  against  which  our 
little  human  torches  flicker  and  flame;  so 
they  alone  feel  the  urgent  impulse  to  lift 
their  torches  high,  to  cry  aloud,  to  reveal,  to 
lead. 

The  crowd  rebels  against  the  universal 
theme  of  art — the  littleness  of  man — or, 
rather  against  the  abysmal  contrast  between 
his  littleness  and  his  greatness.  In  old  Chi 
nese  paintings  there  is  always  some  little 
weazened  philosopher  squinting  at  the  cat 
aract;  and  so  in  all  great  art  stands  the  ab 
surd,  earth-bound,  gnome-like  figure  of  hu 
manity  facing  the  infinite  with  inadequate 
and  unattainable  dreams.  Deep-buried  in 
the  heart  of  every  man  is  some  effigy  of  this 
figure,  but  most  men  are  afraid  of  it,  like 
to  bury  it  deeper  under  conventional  occupa 
tions,  sentimentalities,  moralities,  instead  of 
permitting  artists  and  prophets  to  unearth 
it  and  expose  it  to  the  pitiless  light.  But 
every  man's  heart,  however  perverse  with 
ignorance,  however  cluttered  with  knowl- 


66       THE   YOUNG   IDEA 

edge,  makes  a  secret  confession  of  the  truth. 
Poets  and  prophets,  therefore — the  beauty 
of  art,  the  sublimity  of  truth — appeal  to  him 
not  quite  in  vain;  and  the  appeal  must  go 
on  as  long  as  the  race  endures.  To  the  last 
trench  and  the  last  despair  certain  spirits,  in 
whom  the  common  human  spark  of  love  be 
comes  a  flaming  passion,  must  keep  up  the 
eternal  impossible  fight  for  souls,  for  a  "king 
dom  of  heaven  on  earth." 

Mr.  James  Oppenheim,  novelist  and  poet, 
is  editor  of  "The  Seven  Arts,"  a  magazine 
of  "American  artists,  American  authors, 
American  critics  for  America — possibly  for 
a  new  America,  an  America  waking  to  that 
self-consciousness  which  is  the  first  step  to 
ward  national  greatness."  Mr.  Oppenheim's 
verse  is  an  experiment  in  polyrhythmic 
forms.  He  submitted  very  courteously  to 
an  interview,  the  report  of  which,  he  was 
gracious  enough  to  say,  transcribed  the  out 
lines  of  his  thought  with  accuracy. 

"There  are,"  said  Mr.  James  Oppenheim, 


THE    EMPIRICISTS      67 

"two  important  currents  in  our  contempo 
rary  poetry  which  seem  to  be  the  result  and 
the  expression  of  two  different  conceptions 
of  poetry.  In  the  first  place  there  is  a  strong 
English  influence  which  has  built  up  our 
New  England  tradition.  The  chief  charac 
teristic  of  that  tradition  is  that  it  has  con 
ceived  poetry  as  intellectual  rather  than  emo 
tional  expression.  We  Americans,  like  the 
English,  seem  to  fear  emotion  and  the  ex 
pression  of  emotion ;  we  do  not  trust  our  feel 
ings,  and  prefer  to  restrain  them.  As  a  re 
sult,  the  content  of  the  poetry  created  under 
the  influence  of  the  New  England  tradi 
tion  is  almost  wholly  intellectual  in  its  char 
acter.  The  poet  whose  influence  is  today 
most  strongly  expressed  in  this  poetry  is 
Robert  Browning.  His  dramatic  lyrics 
have  contributed,  both  in  form  and  in  con 
tent,  to  the  work  of  such  men  as  Edward 
Arlington  Robinson,  Robert  Frost,  and 
Edgar  Lee  Masters,  who,  despite  the  fact 
that  he  writes  of  the  middle  west,  may  be 
considered  a  transplanted  New  Englander. 


68       THE    YOUNG   IDEA 

In  opposition  to  the  ideals  of  the  New 
England  tradition  there  are  a  few  poets  writ 
ing  to-day,  of  whom  I  am  one,  who  conceive 
poetry  as  being  primarily  an  expression  of 
emotion.  They  do  not  fear  their  emotions 
and  they  are  not  afraid  of  expressing  them 
honestly  and  naturally;  and  one  of  the  re 
sults  of  this  tendency  has  been  a  loosening 
up  of  poetic  form.  Poetic  form  is  not  in 
itself,  however,  a  very  important  matter.  It 
becomes  important  only  after  the  poem  has 
been  written.  Today  we  say  that  the  Eliza 
bethan  dramatists  wrote  blank  verse  that  for 
sheer  beauty  is  unequalled  in  English  liter 
ature.  But  they  were  not,  when  they  wrote, 
trying  to  write  great  blank  verse.  They 
were  expressing  themselves  in  the  medium 
most  natural  to  them.  So  today  poets  are 
writing,  for  example,  in  free  verse  because 
that  is  theway  in  which  they  feel  their  poems. 
The  strongest  influence  felt  by  those  of  us 
who  are  in  revolt  against  the  New  England 
tradition  is  that  of  Walt  Whitman.  But 
what  influences  us  in  his  poetry  is  its  content, 


THE    EMPIRICISTS      69 

and  we  are  influenced  by  his  poetic  form  only 
as  a  result  of  having  first  been  influenced 
by  his  poetic  content.  There  are,  on  the 
other  hand,  certain  contemporary  followers 
of  the  New  England  tradition  who  have  de 
rived  their  expression,  but  not  the  content 
of  their  art,  from  the  same  source. 

One  of  the  greatest  dangers  that  threatens 
our  contemporary  poetry  is  the  tendency  to 
ward  localization.  I  feel  that  many  of  the 
poets  who  are  writing  today  are  deliberately 
representative  of  some  small  locality.  Hu 
man  life  and  human  emotions  are  largely  the 
same  everywhere;  their  identity  is  essential, 
their  diversity  only  superficial.  Therefore, 
the  poet  who  wishes  to  express  the  life  of 
any  particular  locality  must  first  express  the 
life  of  our  country  as  a  whole.  The  funda 
mentally  national,  and  only  incidentally 
local  vision,  is  the  vision  of  which  American 
poetry  stands  in  greatest  need  today. 

The  imagists  have  fulfilled  an  important 
function  in  demonstrating  the  importance  of 
disciplining  our  language  and  in  directing 


70       THE    YOUNG   IDEA 

our  attention  to  exactness  of  expression  and 
to  the  distinction  of  values  in  the  use  of 
words.  They  are,  in  this  respect,  our  con 
temporary  purists.  But  as  a  theory  of  art 
imagism  is  foredoomed  to  failure,  for  it  is 
tending  toward  a  separation  between  art  and 
life,  and  since  art  is  a  form  of  human  expres 
sion,  there  can  be  no  divorce  between  life  and 
art.  The  chief  difference  between  the  poetry 
of  yesterday  and  the  poetry  of  today  lies  in 
the  fact  that  while  the  poetry  of  yesterday 
was  an  exercise,  the  poetry  of  today  is  an 
expression. 

If  our  poetry  is  to  progress  beyond  its 
present  level,  I  feel  such  progress  will  be 
the  result  of  a  more  general  revolt  against 
what  I  have  called  the  English,  or  the  New 
England,  tradition.  Before  our  poetry  can 
truly  express  our  life  we  must  rid  ourselves 
of  foreign  influences,  and  become  really 
self-conscious  as  Americans.  The  culture  of 
other  nations  is  both  important  and  interest 
ing,  but  it  is  far  more  important  for  our 
art  to  express  our  own  culture  and  our  own 


THE    EMPIRICISTS      71 

life  than  the  life  and  the  culture  of  other 
peoples.  Today  poetry  is  undergoing  one 
of  its  periodical  returns  to  the  soil;  the 
poetry  of  our  immediate  past,  the  work,  for 
example,  of  Thomas  Bailey  Aldrich  and 
Richard  Watson  Gilder,  was  refined  away 
from  life  as  far  as  possible.  The  poets  of 
yesterday  tried  to  create  an  art  remote  from 
life.  Today  we  are  trying  to  create  an  art 
which  shall  express  our  own  experience  of 
our  own  life.  And  the  most  hopeful  sign 
in  our  contemporary  renascence  of  poetry  is 
that  it  is,  fundamentally,  a  renascence  of 
common  experience.  I  feel  that  contempo 
rary  American  poetry  has  achieved  in  this 
respect  a  higher  level  than  any  other  literary 
activity  of  today  in  the  United  States.  I 
do  not  think  that  a  parallel  advance  has 
been  manifested  in  either  the  novel  or  the 
drama.  But  the  poetry  that  is  being  written 
today  holds  out  the  promise  of  a  literature 
which,  if  we  concentrate  upon  our  own  ex 
perience,  express  our  life  and  our  emotions 
in  the  form  most  natural  to  each  of  us  in- 


72       THE   tYOUNG   IDEA 

dividually,  and  write  what  we  feel  without 
fear  and  without  reticence,  will  truly  be  a 
significant  expression  of  American  life." 

Mr.  Louis  Untermeyer  is  a  prophet  of  the 
democratic  spirit,  and  the  social  content  of 
his  art  finds  expression  in  a  vesture  of  lyric 
beauty.  He  is,  primarily,  a  singer,  and  his 
ever-increasing  interest  in  social  problems 
has  in  no  wise  diminished  the  beauty  of  his 
songs.  In  the  following  essay  he  enunciates 
that  faith  in  the  romance  of  the  common 
place  which  is  the  essential  discovery  of  his 
poetry. 

The  conservative  of  every  age  has  been 
his  own  iconoclast.  And  often,  in  building 
on  the  time-eaten  and  treacherous  timber  of 
the  past,  he  has  brought  down  not  only  his 
idols,  but  the  temple  that  contained  them. 
Our  thinking  is  improving  architecturally. 
We  blast  deeper  before  building;  we  have 
become  far  more  critical  of  the  foundations. 
And,  in  getting  down  to  bedrock,  a  hundred 
undermined  and  rotting  formulas  have  been 


THE    EMPIRICISTS      73 

exposed  and  demolished.  Many  are  the  pre 
served  and  rooted  aristocracies  that  have 
been  threatened;  and  now,  with  the  rush  of 
unsuspected  energies,  comes  the  end  of  the 
aristocracy  of  the  arts.  And  poetry,  being 
the  most  patrician  of  all  the  crafts,  is  the  last 
to  become  democratized.  But  the  change  is 
inevitable ;  its  advent  has  come  upon  us  with 
the  strange  and  sudden  power  of  all  things 
new.  New,  first  of  all,  in  spirit.  Not  since 
the  classic  New  England  group  has  Amer 
ican  poetry  had  so  great  an  impetus  and  so 
full-throated  an  utterance.  And  never  has 
that  utterance  been  so  rich,  so  free  and  so 
varied. 

Much  of  this  is  due  to  the  fact  that  our 

poets  are  coming  back  to  the  oldest  and  most 

> 

stirring  tongue;  they  are  using  a  language 
that  is  the  language  of  the  people.  Nor  is 
this  a  mere  revolt  from  the  stilted  and 
asstheticized  vision  of  life.  They  have  redis 
covered  the  beauty  and  dignity,  I  might  al 
most  say  the  divine  core,  of  the  casual  and 
commonplace ;  and  they  are  bringing  back  to 


74       THE   YOUNG   IDEA 

ordinary  speech  that  same  beauty  and  dig 
nity,  calling  forth  its  inherent  warmth  and 
wonder.  Whitman,  as  much  the  prophet  as 
the  poet,  foretold  this  in  his  little-known  and 
highly  characteristic  "An  American  Primer." 
a  thin  sketch  of  a  book  which  throws  a  series 
of  illuminating  sidelights  on  himself  and  his 
aims.  In  furtherance  of  his  belief  that  the 
whole  "Leaves  of  Grass"  was  a  gigantic  lan 
guage  experiment,  an  effort  toward  a  demo 
cratic  poetry,  he  said:  "It  is  an  attempt  to 
give  the  spirit,  the  body  and  the  man,  new 
words,  new  potentialities  of  speech — an 
American,  a  cosmopolitan  (for  the  best  of 
America  is  the  best  cosmopolitanism)  range 
of  self-expression."  He  wrote  also  "The 
Americans  are  going  to  be  the  most  fluent 
and  melodious-voiced  people  in  the  world — 
and  the  most  perfect  users  of  words.  *  *  * 
The  new  times,  the  new  people,  the  new  vista 
need  a  tongue  according — yes,  and  what  is 
more,  they  will  have  such  a  tongue." 

And  it  was  Whitman's  use  of  tHe  rich 
verbal  material  that  flowered  in  the  street 


THE    EMPIRICISTS      75 

rather  than  in  libraries  that  made  him  so 
remarkable.  That  large  spirit  was  set  free 
and  made  common  to  all  men,  not  so  much 
because  of  his  form  or  his  philosophy,  but 
because  of  his  words.  And  it  was  this  love 
and  sublimation  of  the  colloquial  and  racy 
that  made  him  so  great  an  artistic  influence 
— an  influence  that  was  not  only  liberal  but 
liberating.  It  was  Whitman,  more  than  any 
single  element,  unless  one  includes  the  in 
direct  force  of  a  wider  social  feeling,  that 
broke  the  fetters  of  the  poet  and  opened  the 
doors  of  America  to  him. 

From  what,  it  may  be  asked,  has  the  poet 
been  set  free  ?  Let  us  say,  in  a  sweeping  gen 
erality,  from  a  preoccupation  with  a  poetic 
past,  from  the  repeating  of  echoes  and  glib 
superficials,  in  the  first  place.  He  has  been 
transferred  from  a  fantastic  literary  limbo — 
a  panorama  of  mythological  figures  and 
moralistic  scraps  seen  through  a  mist.  And 
what  has  he  been  set  free  for?  Well,  for 
one  thing,  to  look  at  the  world  he  lives  in; 
to  study  and  synthesize  the  startling  fusion 


76       THE    YOUNG   IDEA 

of  races  and  ideas;  the  limitless  miracles  of 
science  and  its  limitless  curiosity;  the  grop 
ing  and  stumbling  toward  a  genuine  social 
democracy — the  whole  welter  and  struggle 
and  beauty  of  the  modern  world.  He  has 
been  set  free  to  face  these.  For  even  though 
he  tries  to  recreate  the  tunes  of  an  antique 
lyricist,  listening  only  to  the  echoes  of  a 
thousand  years,  he  will  find  it  hard  to  escape 
his  times. 

And  that  escape  has  become  increasingly 
difficult.  The  wireless,  the  rural  free  de 
livery,  the  ubiquitous  and  omniscient  news 
papers  follow  him  everywhere.  No  matter 
how  distant  his  hiding  place,  he  cannot  get 
away  from  the  world's  loud  and  restless 
activities ;  the  tiniest  hamlet  reproduces  and 
buzzes  with  the  stress  of  the  whole  world. 
The  retreat  to  the  poet's  ivory  tower  is 
blocked  on  every  side. 

Not  that  the  escape  is  impossible ;  it  is  the 
artists'  power  and  prerogative,  and  many  of 
them  have  availed  themselves  of  the  priv 
ilege.  Like  Keats,  the  poet  may  fly  to  a 


THE    EMPIRICISTS      77 

strange  and  soothing  antiquity;  or,  like  Poe, 
he  may  build  and  populate  a  misty  No  Man's 
Land.  But  unless  he  can  make  his  world  as 
actual  and  convincing  as  our  own,  he  will 
have  failed — even  in  his  escape,  and  cer 
tainly  in  his  poetry. 

And  it  is  this  difference  that  is  shown  in 
the  temper  of  the  most  of  the  living  poets; 
they  are  not  anxious  to  escape.  They  are 
not  frightened  or  disgusted  with  their  times ; 
they  are  fascinated  by  them.  They  are  in 
love  with  their  world;  passionately,  even 
painfully.  It  may  be  urged  that  this  might 
be  said  of  the  first  poets  of  any  time ;  that  the 
artist  has  always  been  intensely  interested  in 
his  age  and  has,  consciously  or  unconsciously, 
reflected  it.  And,  to  a  great  extent,  this  is 
true.  But,  above  all,  what  distinguishes  this 
age  from  the  preceding  ones  is  its  sharp, 
probing  quality,  its  insatiable  curiosity,  its 
determined  self-analysis.  And  it  is  not,  as 
in  the  past,  the  spasmodic  effort  of  a 
group  or  the  rare  interpretative  power  of 
one  great  mind  that  stands  out.  It  is 


78       THE   YOUNG   IDEA 

the  steady  drive  of  the  mind  of  man  now 
turned  in  like  a  great  searchlight  upon 
itself.  In  every  field;  from  the  artistic  to 
the  political — one  sees  this  restless  search 
ing,  this  effort  toward  new  values,  toward 
ascertaining  its  own  larger  possibilities.  I 
said  before  that  the  artist  had  been  set  free 
for  a  clear  look  at  his  own  age.  It  would 
have  been  truer  to  say  that  he  is  being  set 
free  for  a  clear  look  at  himself.  *  *  *  Let 
us  see  by  a  few  instances  how  far-reaching 
this  eagerness,  this  introspection,  really 
is. 

James  Oppenheim  is  an  excellent  example. 
Even  in  the  early  "Doctor  Rast"  stories, 
with  their  sentimental  solutions,  and  the  ten 
tative  "Monday  Morning  and  Other  Poems," 
there  was  always  apparent,  beneath  the 
stammering  and  the  awkward  lines,  a  strain 
ing  vision.  And  in  his  recent  "Songs  for  the 
New  Age"  that  vision  achieves  its  fullest  ex 
pression.  Rhapsody  is  still  there,  but  it  is 
rhapsody  without  rant.  The  old  passion  for 
landscapes  and  men  and  music  and  justice 


THE    EMPIRICISTS      79 

are  here  also ;  but  it  is  lifted  and  clarified  in 
a  greater  singing.  And  there  is  a  new  ele 
ment — a  slow  searching  that  goes  on  beneath 
the  musical  and  literary  surface  of  all  the 
poems.  Beneath  it,  and,  at  the  same  time, 
beyond  it.  Psalms  and  prophecies  these 
poems  are,  in  form  as  well  as  feeling — the 
old  Isaiah  note,  revived  and  lifted  out  of 
the  crowded  streets — but  they  are  something 
more;  they  are  an  attempt  to  diagnose  the 
twisted  soul  of  man  and  the  twisted  times 
that  he  lives  in.  In  this  work  Oppenheim 
reveals  the  world  conflict  reproduced  within 
one's  self;  it  is  an  attempt  to  assemble  the 
elements  of  gigantic  struggle  and  to  syn 
thesize  them. 

Almost  at  the  other  extreme  in  manner 
and  method  is  Edwin  Arlington  Robinson. 
His  sharp,  even  rhythms  and  chiselled 
rhymes  are  the  antithesis  of  Oppenheim's 
polyrhythmic  lines ;  but  a  similar  impulse  is 
in  them  both.  Witness  the  close-packed  sense 
of  mental  struggle  in  the  shorter  poems  in 
"The  Town  Down  the  River,"  and  the  psy- 


80       THE    YOUNG   IDEA 

chological  interplay  of  character  and  envir 
onment  in  "Captain  Craig."  Witness,  also, 
the  color  and  simplicity,  sometimes  the  al 
most  baffling  simplicity  of  his  speech,  as 
shown  in  his  latest  volume,  "The  Man 
Against  the  Sky." 

Or  turn  to  a  poet  who  has  apparently  noth 
ing  in  common  with  either.  In  "North  of 
Boston"  Robert  Frost  sets  down  a  series  of 
scenes  and  incidents  of  New  England  life, 
and  sets  it  down  in  a  loose,  blank  verse  that 
is  so  natural  in  speech  that  many  missing  the 
familiar,  ready-made  glamor,  have  taken  it 
for  prose.  And  it  is  in  this  very  naturalness 
of  language,  in  the  constant  use  of  the  spoken 
rather  than  the  "literary"  word,  that  he 
achieves  both  poetry  and  revelation.  In 
Frost  we  find  the  poet  who  extends  our  lit 
erary  borders  not  only  with  fresh  sight  but 
with  fresh  sounds.  These  sounds,  let  in  from 
the  vernacular,  are  full  of  a  robust  and  cre 
ative  energy;  they  are  red  corpuscles  to  the 
thinning  blood  of  our  speech.  Possibly  in 
his  "The  Death  of  the  Hired  Man"1  and 


THE    EMPIRICISTS      81 

"Birches,"  to  take  two  dissimilar  examples, 
this  vigor  of  words  is  most  evident;  but  it 
leaps  out  of  all  his  work  with  a  restless, 
somewhat  roundabout  but  always  keen  and 
plunging  psychology.  In  his  most  recent 
work  ("Mountain  Interval")  we  find  these 

s 

same  direct  and  distinguished  qualities.  But 
a  new  element  is  here — a  warmer,  even  a 
more  whimsical  reflection  of  a  life  that 
seemed  gray,  and,  even  in  its  humors,  grim. 
This  geniality  does  not  mean  that  Frost's 
penetration  is  any  less  deep  than  it  was;  it 
means  merely  that  he  has  brought  emotions 
nearer  the  surface.  So  with  the  unexpected 
lyrics  in  this  volume;  they  emphasize  the 
happier  undercurrent  by  emphasizing  the 
singer  no  less  than  the  seeker.  It  is  its  differ 
ences  even  more  than  its  similarities  that 
make  "Mountain  Interval"  a  worthy  suc 
cessor  to  "North  of  Boston." 

Scarcely  less  unusual  is  Edgar  Lee  Mas 
ters'  "Spoon  River  Anthology" — an  inter 
esting  and  remarkable  work,  although  as  a 
book  of  poems  a  greatly  overrated  one.  For, 


82       THE   .YOUNG   IDEA 

though  he  shares  that  same  clarity  and  di 
rectness  of  eye  and  speech  with  the  others, 
"Spoon  River  Anthology,"  although  it  is 
notable  as  character  drawing  and  drama,  is 
often  negligible  in  poetic  power.  At  least, 
poetry  is  its  frailest  quality.  For  when  Mr. 
Masters  writes,  as  he  sometimes  tries  to  do, 
poetry  per  sey  his  fresh  strength  is  mixed 
with  a  stale  and  mystical  flabbiness.  Most 
of  the  rhymed  portions  of  his  new  "Songs 
and  Satires"  are  cases  in  point.  It  may  be 
that  his  sharp  irony  dulls  the  edge  of  his 
poetic  impulse.  Or  it  may  be  that  Mr.  Mas 
ters  is  a  sharp-eyed  novelist  and  not,  first 
of  all,  a  poet.  Compare  his  treatment  of  peo 
ple,  for  instance,  with  Frost's.  Masters, 
with  great  sophistication  and  almost  constant 
disillusion,  enjoys  most  of  all  the  surface 
gossip  of  his  folk;  sometimes  he  throws  a 
high  light  on  one  submerged  motive  or  inci 
dent  (or  a  series  of  them)  in  his  characters' 
lives.  But  Frost  goes  deeper ;  his  light,  less 
brilliant  and  less  superficial,  does  not  merely 
set  off  his  figures.  It  penetrates  them.  It 


THE    EMPIRICISTS      83 

reaches  down  through  his  people  to  their 
roots;  it  strikes  the  soil  from  which  they 
grew.  It  even  transforms  the  whole  country 
side  and  makes  it  something  more  than  an 
effective  background;  it  gives  his  setting  the 
quality  of  an  immense  and  moving  actor  in 
the  lives  of  the  folk  it  overshadows. 

Amy  Lowell's  recent  New  England  dia 
lect  poems,  done  with  her  usual  economy  of 
line,  have  some  of  these  qualities.  Her  vol 
ume  "Sword  Blades  and  Poppy  Seeds"  dis 
plays  other  but  no  less  striking  sides  of  her 
ability.  Of  all  the  women  singers  in  Amer 
ica  (and  there  are  at  least  a  dozen  excellent 
ones)  she  is  the  most  vigorous  and  individual. 
Her  work  blends  very  curiously  a  delicate, 
feminine  whimsy,  a  love  of  diablerie  and  the 
grotesque  with  an  almost  stark,  square-shoul 
dered  virility.  With  all  these,  and  an  in 
cisive  satire,  she  cuts  through  tawdry  and  the 
commonplace  surfaces  to  hidden  and  beauti 
ful  depths.  Swinging  away  on  one  hand 
from  the  soft  sighings  of  her  past  and  on  the 
other  from  the  rigidity  of  the  Imagists' credo, 


84       THE    YOUNG   IDEA 

she  has  achieved  a  poise  and  a  power  rare 
among  American  poets  of  either  sex. 

No  clear  perspective  has  as  yet  been  al 
lowed  the  Imagists  themselves.  They  have 
suffered  chiefly  from  two  things;  too  much 
advertising  and  the  larger  group's  hatred 
for  the  smaller  one.  But  the  infuriated 
critics  of  Imagism  have  suffered  still  more. 
They  have  for  the  most  part  fallen  heatedly 
from  their  calm  eminences  by  making  the 
mistake  of  denouncing  not  the  Imagist  poets 
nor  the  Imagist  propaganda,  but  the  Imagist 
pronunciamento.  Most  of  them  failed  to 
see  that  when  they  were  attacking  the 
Imagists'  credo  of  "using  the  exact  word"; 
of  allowing  "freedom  in  choice  of  subject"; 
of  "producing  poetry  that  is  hard  and  clear," 
and  of  the  "importance  of  concentration," 
they  were  attacking  the  essentials  of  all 
great  literature.  The  Imagists,  realizing 
the  need  for  the  constant  re-statement  and 
re-shaping  of  old  truths,  have  repeated  con 
sciously  certain  fundamental  principles  ob 
served  by  every  poet  more  or  less  uncon- 


THE    EMPIRICISTS      85 

sciously.  And  even  their  over-emphasis  will 
have  a  salutary  rather  than  a  harmful  effect. 
Discounting  the  inverted  classicism  that  still 
attaches  itself  to  certain  poets  of  the  group, 
in  spite  of  the  frantic  convulsions  of  its  more 
spectacular  adherents  and  recent  self -elected 
exponents,  for  all  its  occasional  fridigity  and 
frequent  exaggerations  that  spring  from  an 
unholy  fear  of  the  cliche,  Imagism  is  a 
strong  influence  for  good.  It  is  excellent 
fertilizer  in  the  fields  of  poetry;  it  will  help 
nurture  the  new  and  stronger  crop.  It  will 
do  this  since  its  very  "hardness,"  its  sharp 
edges  and  images,  and  its  constant  insistence 
on  packing  and  cutting  down  are  a  vigorous 
and  healthy  reaction  from  the  verbose,  the 
carelessly  facile  and  the  pale,  pretty  reiter 
ations  of  a  rubber-stamp  loveliness. 

The  list  of  the  "new"  poets  could  be  pro 
longed  for  another  page.  Though  only  a  few 
are  mentioned,  one  must  notice  Vachel  Lind 
say,  with  his  infectious  combination  of 
rhymes,  rag-time  and  religion;  his  remark 
able  attempts  to  interpret  the  soul  of  a  nation 


86       THE    YOUNG   IDEA 

through  its  sounds,  and  his  efforts  to  bring 
art,  prohibition  and  Socialism  (and  his  faith 
in  this  strange  blend  is  not  the  least  of  his 
qualities)  to  the  villages.  Mr.  Lindsay  sees 
(and  hears)  poetry  not  only  in  Springfield 
and  the  moving  pictures,  but  in  negro  camp- 
meetings  and  automobile  horns  and  fire- 
engines  and  the  United  States  Senate  and 
a  Chinese  laundry.  Nor  are  his  eyes  and 
ears  any  the  less  keen  when  Mr.  Lindsay  is 
in  a  quieter  and  more  meditative  mood. 

But  to  proceed:  John  Hall  Wheelock,  in 
his  "The  Human  Fantasy"  and  "The  Be 
loved  Adventure,"  two  volumes  vibrant  with 
"the  warm  recklessness  of  lavish  life,"  is  an 
other  of  the  poets  who  see  "the  universe  made 
of  dust,  but  holy  to  the  core" ;  his  work  glows 
with  the  realization  of  a  "lovable,  sordid  hu 
manity."  In  the  first  of  these  volumes  is  the 
splendid  lyric  "Sunday  Evening  in  the  Com 
mon,"  one  of  the  loveliest  of  pure  American 
lyrics,  with  the  exception  of  Poe's  "To 
Helen"  and  Whitman's  Lincoln  elegies. 

Then  there  is  Witter  Bynner,  who  can  get 


THE    EMPIRICISTS      87 

magic  and  metaphysics  out  of  a  Pullman 
smoker;  William  Ellery  Leonard  with  "The 
Vaunt  of  Man"  to  his  great  credit  and  a 
group  of  poignant  sonnets ;  Arthur  Davison 
Ficke,  another  eminent  sonneteer  who  stings 
his  archaisms  into  life  with  the  whiplash  of 
a  personality;  Carl  Sandburg,  whose  first 
volume,  "Chicago  Poems,"   shows  him  at 
times  the  most  tender  and  at  times  the  most 
brutal  of  our  poets ;  who  proves  Synge's  con 
tention  that  it  is  the  timber  of  poetry  that 
wears  most  surely,  and  there  "is  no  timber 
that  has  not  strong  roots  among  the  clay  and 
worms."    Plain  speaking  and  outspoken,  he 
uses  words  as  weapons ;  but  he  can  also  use 
them  as  delicately  as  an  engraver  his  tool. 
He  has  the  etcher's  power,  with  its  firm, 
clean-cut  and  always  suggestive  line — but  he 
is    never   merely   the  artist.    His    hate,    a 
strengthening  and  challenging  force,  might 
overbalance  the  power  of  his  work  were  it 
not  exceeded  by  the  fiercer  virility  of  his  love. 
Arturo  Giovanitti,  with  his  hot  and  raucous 
hymns  of  democracy,  is  another  radical,  min- 


88       THE    YOUNG   IDEA 

gling  these  two  dangerous  combustibles,  love 
and  dynamite.  Also  there  is  Clement  Wood, 
another  fiery  poet  of  protest,  whose  first  vol 
ume  is  still  to  appear;  William  Rose  Benet, 
with  his  affections  divided  between  stark 
modernities  and  rollicking  chanties  or  weird 
ballads  of  a  fantastic  world;  John  G.  Nei- 
hardt,  Maxwell  Bodenheim,  Eunice  Tiet- 
jens,  Margaret  Widdemer,  Harriet  Monroe, 
Helen  Hoyt,  Max  Eastman — and  a  dozen 
other  strangely  contrasted  artists  could  be 
added. 

And  though  all  these  poets  differ  in  choice 
of  theme,  in  method  and  in  temper,  still  they 
are  united  by  a  definite  though  a  loose  bond. 
Each  of  these  poets  respond  to  and  reflect 
the  two  strangely  creative  powers  of  our  day 
— its  restlessness  and  analysis.  Each  poet 
is  an  active  part  of  a  new  impetus  and  fervor ; 
in  his  love  for  his  times  he  is  revealing  both 
himself  and  his  age.  He  is  determined  to 
know  his  world  and  to  realize  it  completely. 
He  does  something  more  than  accept  a  shop 
worn  glamor  and  formulas  of  beauty  that 


THE   EMPIRICISTS      89 

have  been  handed  down  to  him ;  he  questions 
them.  He  is  going  to  look  for  beauty  for 
himself  everywhere,  in  strange  places  pos 
sibly;  but  he  is  going  to  find  it.  And  he 
is  going  to  wrest  it  from  the  neglected  and 
trivial — even  out  of  the  dark  cavern  of  the 
ugly  and  the  subconscious.  For  it  is  this  in 
tense  love  for  the  whole  world,  not  a  part  of 
it,  that  impels  and  uplifts  him.  He  sees  the 
amazing  vitality  beneath  what  seems  merely 
vociferous;  he  knows  the  health  that  is  in 
the  heart  of  vulgarity.  And  it  is  this  burn 
ing  intensity,  this  analysis,  that  sharpens  and 
vivifies  all  incidents  and  emotions;  that  re 
veals  the  ordinary  in  fresh  and  shining  colors. 
There  are  poets,  no  doubt,  who  still  can  be 
unstirred  by  these  things  within  his  world. 
But  the  poet  to-day  who  definitely  desires  to 
escape  them  is  rare,  a  creature  to  be  won 
dered  at  rather  than  to  be  scorned.  He  is 
not  exactly  a  coward.  He  is  much  too  be 
wildered  and  half-hearted  to  be  that.  He 
is  an  anachronism.  For  poetry  is  something 
more  than  a  graceful,  literary  escape  from 


90      THE   YOUNG   IDEA 

life.    It  is  a  spirited  encounter  with  it. 

Miss  Margaret  Widdemer,  a  writer  of 
both  verse  and  prose,  writes  illuminatingly 
of  the  relation  of  the  contemporary  poet  to 
the  world  about  him. 

There  unquestionably  is  a  new  movement 
in  our  literature  today;  a  distinct  effort  to  ] 
formulate  and  realize  ourselves  and  our  re 
lation  to  life  in  the  present,  as  differing  from 
the  old  feeling  which,  more  or  less  differently 
phrased,  the  writers  of  other  times  have  felt, 
of  "writing  for  eternity."  The  older  idea, 
I  think,  was  to  write,  if  the  work  was  serious 
at  all,  of  the  eternal  verities,  the  things  which 
were  and  would  be  changeless,  and  were  of 
no  time.  What  reflection  of  the  moment's 
thought  was  in  their  work  was  more  or  less 
an  involuntary  thing,  though  to  this  unin 
tentional  reflection  of  the  psychology  of  the 
moment  many  of  the  older  writers  owe  what 
place  remains  to  them  in  the  present.  We 
have  come  to  the  place  where  our  civiliza- 


THE    EMPIRICISTS      91 

tion  is  becoming  self-conscious,  and  record 
its  own  attitude  of  mind,  knowing  this  to  be 
a  thing  as  worthy  of  record  as  any  attitude 
of  mind  we  may  glean  from  writers  of  other 
periods.  We  are  realizing  that  romance,  and 
the  battle  between  good  and  evil,  is  here  with 
us,  not  locked  on  shelves  with  book-people  in 
costume,  and  are  self-consciously  evoking  it. 
This  is  the  most  important  feeling — in 
deed,  the  main  feeling — of  today's  literature. 
It  has  its  good  and  evil  side,  as  any  self- 
consciousness  has.  We  are  in  danger  of  com 
ing  to  feel  that  our  view  is  the  only  view,  our 
age  the  only  age,  and,  in  our  anxiety  to  lose 
false  glamor  and  false  relations,  lose  the 
True  Romance,  and  drop  into  a  fashion  of 
making  our  books  laborious  patchworks 
made  out  of  little  pieces  of  meaningless,  aim 
less  realities,  as  futile  as  a  Futurist  color- 
scheme.  If  we  can  show  that  the  little  scraps 
and  pieces  of  our  lives  today  will  eventually 
make  a  thing  which  is  as  real  and  worth 
while  and  great  as  any  of  the  old  great  ro 
mances  we  are  creating  something  which  is 


92      THE   YOUNG  IDEA 

epic  and  lasting.     In  these  alternatives  lie 
our  danger  and  our  capability  of  success. 

As  to  my  own  work,  I  think  that  any  work 
which  bears  a  deliberate  and  self-conscious 
relation  to  "movements"  is  in  just  so  far 
a  mistaken  and  artificial  mechanism,  not  cre 
ative  or  alive  at  all.    My  poetry  has  never 
been  written  with  the  deliberate  idea  of  ex 
pressing  this  or  that ;  it  has  been  written  be 
cause  it  was  there  in  my  mind  to  write,  with 
out  any  idea  of  being  "among  those  present." 
But  looking  at  it  as  a  body  of  work,  now 
that  it  is  something  done  and  printed,  it 
seems  to  me  that  I  have  unknowingly  taken 
for  my  share  of  the  day's  self-expression  the 
things  women  are  thinking  and  feeling — the 
things  that  many  of  them  are  not  yet  able  to 
say.     I  am  not  the  only  one  who  is  doing 
this.    I  only  mean  that  this  is  what  I  seem 
to  myself  to  be  doing.    As  to  my  prose,  I 
don't  think  I  can  say  what  relation  that  has 
to  present  day  literary  movements,  because 
as  yet  I  have  tried  to  do  little  more  than  be 
a  story-teller  in  the  bazaar — to  relate  ro- 


THE    EMPIRICISTS      93 

mances  which  should  be  sane  and  light- 
hearted,  and  which  would  make  people  gayer, 
perhaps,  and  perhaps  a  little  comforted 
about  the  gray  spots  in  the  world,  for  read 
ing  them. 

I  don't  believe  I  am  capable  of  a  criticism 
of  "contemporary  literature  as  a  whole"  any 
more  than  I  have  done.  It's  going  to  be  a 
big  thing,  I  believe,  but,  like  America  itself, 
it  is  as  yet  chaotic,  a  grand,  but  unwelded 
thing.  It  isn't  a  whole  so  far.  But  I  know 
it  will  be. 


THE   ROMANTICISTS 


II 

THE  ROMANTICISTS 

THE  essence  of  romanticism  is  a  revolt 
against  convention;  in  art  every  romantic 
movement  has  manifested  itself  in  a  deter 
mination  to  extend  the  domain  of  experience 
and  likewise  to  transcend  the  traditional 
forms  of  expression.  The  romantic  quality 
of  any  professedly  romantic  work  of  art, 
therefore,  lies  either  in  a  content  which  is 
strangely  new  or  in  an  unwonted  medium  of 
expression,  or  both;  any  or  all  of  which  is 
intended  to  produce  the  superb  shock  of  the 
unexpected,  and  evoke  an  emotional  reaction 
whose  quality  has  either  been  completely  for 
gotten,  or  else  previously  undiscovered.  By 
pushing  the  definition  to  its  logical  conclu 
sion  we  should  learn  that  the  quality  of  ro 
mance  lies,  not  in  the  work  of  art  at  all,  but 
97 


98       THE   LYOUNG   IDEA 

in  the  emotion  it  arouses.  In  so  far  as  it 
does  not  produce  this  distinctive  quality  of 
emotion  it  fails  in  being  romantic. 

I  shall  be  reproached,  I  fear,  for  terming 
the  representatives  of  Imagism  and  of  Spec- 
trism  Romanticists.  On  the  one  hand,  Miss 
Knish  assures  us  that  the  doctrines  of  the 
Spectric  school,  of  which  her  collaborator, 
Mr.  Morgan,  is  the  founder,  are  a  fresh  in 
terpretation  of  classic  gospels.  On  the  other 
hand,  we  have  been  assured  that  the  reforms 
which  the  Imagists  are  trying  to  work  in  our 
poetry  have  as  their  object  principles  which 
"are  the  essentials  of  all  great  poetry."  But 
to  be  essentially  romantic,  a  work  of  art  need 
discover  to  us  no  new  methods  and  no  new 
idiom.  If  through  old  methods  long  for 
gotten  and  an  old  idiom  it  tricks  our  emo 
tions  into  responding  to  a  new  experience,  it 
has  accomplished  an  essentially  romantic  re 
sult.  So  that,  whether  the  principles  of 
Imagism  and  of  Spectrism  are  new  or  not, 
we  are  privileged  to  call  the  poetry  in  which 
they  have  found  expression  romantic  art,  if 


THE    ROMANTICISTS    99 

for  no  other  reason  than  that  it  has,  judging 
by  its  reception,  produced  an  emotional  re 
action  of  romantic  quality  in  its  readersT"] 
But  there  is  a  further  reason  that  we  can 
urge  in  justification,  and  that  is  that  these 
two  schools  are  preoccupied  chiefly  with  pro 
mulgating  a  new  technique.  Imagism  and 
Spectrism  are  admittedly  programmes  of  re 
volt  in  the  field  of  expression. 

The  singular  fact  in  the  existence  of  these 
two  schools  is  that  their  fundamental  objects 
are  directly  antithetical.  Imagists  proclaim 
their  faith  in  a  rendering  of  an  exact  picture 
in  an  idiom  which  combines  the  character 
istics  of  suggestion,  vividness,  concentration, 
and  externality,  in  either  of  two  forms,  free 
verse  or  polyphonic  prose.  The  Spectrists 
have  as  their  objects  the  diffraction  of  emo 
tion,  and  the  conveying  of  after-images  and 
overtones;  moreover,  they  employ  both  the 
traditional  poetic  forms  and  free  verse.  The 
Spectrists  thus  seem,  in  a  measure,  to  be 
chiefly  interested  in  blurring  and  encircling 
with  a  haze  of  symbols  the  image  which  the 


100     THE   .YOUNG   IDEA 

Imagists,  in  their  poems,  are  anxious  to  con 
vey  with  photographic  precision. 

This  is  not  the  place  to  further  elucidate 
the  theories  of  these  two  schools  of  writers. 
Readers  who  wish  for  more  light  are  re 
ferred  to  the  preface  to  "Some  Imagist 
Poets,"  and  to  Miss  Amy  Lowell's  article, 
"A  Consideration  of  Modern  Poetry"  in  The 
North  American  Review  for  January,  1917, 
and  to  the  preface  to  "Spectra"  by  Miss 
Knish  and  Mr.  Morgan.  It  is  interesting  to 
note,  however,  that  the  poetry  of  both  these 
schools  emphasizes,  each  in  its  own  way,  a 
point  touched  upon  in  the  contribution  of 
Miss  Harriet  Munroe,  the  contrast  between 
man's  littleness  and  the  greatness  of  the  uni 
verse  and  the  fantastic  and  ironic  self-im 
portance  of  man  in  his  relation  to  the  uni 
verse. 

Mr.  John  Gould  Fletcher  belongs,  with 
Miss  Amy  Lowell,  to  the  Imagists,  whose 
program  was  first  enunciated  in  1913.  His 
two  volumes  of  verse,  "Irradiations.  Sand 


THE    ROMANTICISTS     101 

and  Spray/ '  and  "Goblins  and  Pagodas," 
have  given  to  the  public  his  theory  of  the  art 
of  poetry  and  the  product  of  its  practice.  He 
has  been  concerned  chiefly  with  experiments 
in  new  forms.  But  what  he  has  to  say,  in  the 
following  essay,  of  the  content  and  form  of 
contemporary  poetry,  brings  additional 
light  to  bear  upon  the  changes  which  he,  in 
common  with  the  other  Imagists,  are  striving 
to  bring  about  in  our  writing. 

There  can  be  no  doubt  that  at  present 
there  is  a  striving  and  a  stirring  in  American 
Literature,  on  a  scale  never  before  witnessed. 
Hitherto  the  progress  of  American  Liter 
ature  has  been  a  question  of  individuals 
rather  than  of  groups.  The  effect  of  the  Civil 
War  was  to  unify  the  country  politically, 
but  to  decentralize  it  intellectually.  When 
the  Civil  War  came,  a  small  group  of  men 
in  New  England  controlled  America's  lit 
erary  destiny.  The  sixty  years  that  have 
passed  since  then  have  been  years  of  break- 


102     THE   LYOUNG   IDEA 

up  and  transition,  and  the  figures  that  have 
dominated  those  years — Henry  James,  Mark 
Twain,  Bret  Harte — have  been  isolated  ex 
amples  of  genius  rather  than  products  of  any 
intense  feeling  for  literature  on  the  part  of 
large  bodies  of  their  fellow-countrymen.  It 
is  noteworthy  that  all  three  of  these  men 
spent  large  portions  of  their  lives  in  Europe, 
as  if  driven  by  inner  necessity  to  seek  a  more 
favorable  atmosphere  for  production  and 
discussion  of  literature  than  America  offered. 
Only  Whitman  remained,  and  Whitman 
waited  his  life  long  for  the  appreciation  that 
never  came  from  his  country. 

At  present  all  this  is  changed.  America 
is  demanding  a  national  literature,  and  al 
though  this  aspiration  is  not  likely  to  be  sat 
isfied  for  some  years  yet,  nevertheless  steps 
are  being  taken  to  meet  it.  The  War  has 
had  the  effect  of  making  Americans  realize 
that  they  are  something  essentially  different, 
in  spite  of  the  accident  of  a  similar  language, 
from  the  English ;  and  in  spite  of  the  accident 
of  immigration,  from  the  European  stocks. 


THE    ROMANTICISTS     103 

America  is  now  engaged  in  the  process  of 
discovering  itself.  The  process  is  not  yet 
completed,  nor  has  it  gone  on  long  enough 
to  enable  us  with  any  confidence  to  predict 
what  the  future  America  may  produce.  We 
can  only  say  that  the  battle  for  a  new  Amer 
ica  is  being  fought  out  most  fiercely,  in  the 
field  of  pOetry.  Poetry,  which  may  be  de 
fined  as  the  art  of  the  rhythmical  expression 
of  the  emotions,  has,  from  its  very  essence, 
attracted  so  far  the  most  fanatical  of  those 
who  wish  to  renew  American  Literature.  At 
the  same  time,  it  is  more  difficult  to  predict 
what  the  future  course  of  American  poetry 
may  be  than  that  of  any  other  form  of  lit 
erary  activity,  for  two  reasons:  First,  be 
cause  there  is  not  yet  a  large  body  of  per 
sons  who  constantly  read  new  poetry;  sec 
ond,  because  the  great  majority  of  American 

editors  and  critics  who  deal  with  poetry  have 

i 

no  other  standards  to  guide  them  than  the 
remote  traditions  of  their  school  days,  when 
they  were  trained  to  assimilate  that  which, 
whatever  its  place  of  origin,  was  strictly  in 


104     THE    YOUNG   IDEA 

line  with  English  standards  of  writing. 
Now  there  is  only  one  thing  which  may  be 
definitely  predicted  of  American  poetry,  and 
that  is,  whatever  it  may  become  in  the  future, 
it  can  no  longer  follow  English  standards. 
Long  ago  Poe  realized  this  fact,  and  strove 
to  break  loose  from  the  ideals  of  the  English 
Reviews,  and  to  combat  the  influence  of  the 
small  New  England  group,  who,  thanks  to 
their  long  settlement  in  the  country,  and  uni 
versity  training  and  sea-going  traditions,  re 
mained  true  to  English  guidance.  Later  on 
Whitman  devoted  his  life  to  the  same  cause 
of  an  autochthonous  literature.  Meanwhile, 
England  and  Europe  in  general  steadfastly 
refused  to  recognize  any  American  literature 
which  was  not  impregnated  with  this  native 
taint  and  aim.  This  process  has  been  accen 
tuated  since  the  outbreak  of  the  War.  The 
outstanding  results  of  the  European  cata 
clysm  have  been,  politically  and  intellectu 
ally,  to  set  apart  from  the  influence  of  the 
seaboard,  the  Central  United  States,  from 
the  Alleghanies  to  the  Rockies,  and  from  the 


THE    ROMANTICISTS     105 

Canadian  border  to  the  Gulf,  and  to  pro 
claim  their  predominance.  This  block  of 
central  and  valley  States  now  controls  Amer 
ica;  it  is  setting  its  face  southward  and  west 
ward  ;  and  all  other  American  forces,  such  as 
the  small  New  England  group,  are  being 
drawn  into  its  current. 

Athwart  and  throughout  this  central  ten 
dency  there  runs  yet  a  mixture  of  emotional 
and  intellectual  factors  confusing  the  issue. 
There  is  first  of  all  the  factor  of  racial  hered 
ity,  and  of  its  assimilation  to  American  con 
ditions.  This  is  incalculable.  Secondly  and 
more  calculable  as  to  outcome,  are  the  factors 
of  the  struggle  between  vers  libre  and 
rhymed  metre,  of  realism  versus  personal 
fantasy,  of  poetry  based  upon  external  phe 
nomena  or  internal  symbolism.  Let  us  ex 
amine  each  one  in  turn. 

The  battle  for  vers  libre  stands  as  good  as 
won,  in  my  opinion.  America  has  something 
new  and  different  to  express,  and  a  new  ex 
pression  cannot  be  clothed  in  a  guise  of  an 
old  form,  any  more  than  new  wine  can  be 


106     THE    YOUNG   IDEA 

put  into  new  bottles.  We  must  create  our 
poetics  for  ourselves.  The  mere  fact  that 
we  choose  for  the  purposes  of  our  writing 
a  language  very  nearly  similar  to  the  Eng 
lish  tongue,  means  nothing,  any  more  than 
the  New  Testament,  by  being  written  in 
Greek,  holds  parentage  with  Homer  and 
Euripides.  We  must  content  ourselves  with 
not  trying  to  imitate  English  models,  which 
were  created  for  a  different  atmosphere  and 
public  than  our  own,  and  set  ourselves  reso 
lutely  to  the  task  of  creating  new  ones. 
Nevertheless,  it  is  important  to  note  that  vers 
libres  are  as  easy  to  write  as  rhymed  dog 
gerel,  and  that  there  is  no  hope  for  any  form 
which  will  not  develop.  In  its  primitive 
shape,  as  in  the  works  of  Whitman,  vers 
libre  is  simply  natural  rhythm — the  rhythm 
of  the  sea,  the  river,  the  wind  blowing  over  a 
lake  or  the  boughs  rocking  in  the  wind.  We 
must  go  further  than  this.  We  must  build 
up  these  rhythms  into  stanzas  or  blocks  of 
rhythm.  We  must  admit  rhyme,  allitera 
tion,  assonance,  as  occasional  but  valuable 


THE    ROMANTICISTS     107 

adjuncts.  We  must  take  up  the  problem  of 
the  development  of  our  themes,  and  of  our 
style. 

The  struggle  between  realism  and  per 
sonal  fantasy  has  not  yet  been  settled.  The 
realists  such  as  Frost  or  Masters,  have  given 
us  broadly  shaped  works,  but  no  intensely 
vividly  memorable  lines.  The  followers  of 
individual  fantasy,  such  as  the  Imagists,  to 
which  I  belong,  the  New  York  "Others" 
group,  the  recently-appearing  Spectrists, 
have  given  vividly  memorable  lines  and  short 
poems,  but  nothing  of  the  depth  and  human 
breadth  which  the  Realists  display.  It  is 
noteworthy  that  these  Fantaisists  (if  such  I 
may  call  them),  have  shown  a  distinct  ten 
dency  to  group  themselves  into  schools  about 
certain  centres,  whereas  the  Realists  are 
mostly  separate  phenomena. 

It  is  also  noteworthy  that  diverse  poets  as, 
for  example,  Vachel  Lindsay  and  Conrad 
Aiken,  seem  to  be  unable  to  fit  into  either 
group,  but  are  striving  for  a  blend  of  Real 
ism  and  Fantasy — a  poetry  which  demands 


108     THE    YOUNG   IDEA 

at  once  the  most  precise  observation  and  the 
most  complete  use  and  control  of  such  ob 
servation  to  imaginative  ends. 

As  regards  the  third  great  question,  that 
of  external  application  versus  internal  sym 
bolism,  I  must  admit  that  the  former  is  at 
present  triumphant,  although  my  own  sym 
pathies  go  mostly  with  the  latter.  It  seems 
to  me  that  as  the  imagination  of  the  poet 
exercises  itself  more  and  more  freely,  there 
must  come  a  time  when  he  realizes  that  the 
aim  of  all  this  can  be  nothing  more  or  less 
than  the  attempt  to  reconcile  material  phe 
nomena  with  internal  ideas  and  feelings — 
whether  these  be  his  own  or  those  of  other 
people.  And  this  attempt  can  only  express 
itself  by  employing  the  external  world  as 
more  or  less  definite  symbolical  material.  In 
this  respect  I  must  disagree  with  the  "exter- 
nalism"  of  so  brilliant  a  poet  as  Miss  Amy 
^Lowell,  whose  work  seems  to  me,  neverthe 
less,  the  culmination  of  her  own  theory. 

Having  thus  briefly  examined  the  state  of ; 
poetry  today  in  America,  let  me  conclude 


THE    ROMANTICISTS     109 

with    a    word    of    hope    for    the    future. 

America  will  only  attain  to  her  fullest  lit 
erary  development  if  she  can  be  made  to  re 
alize  that  achievement  and  theory  must  go 
hand  in  hand.  We  must  be  prepared  to  build 
up  anew,  on  a  new  basis,  and  therefore  we 
must  not  seek  to  compare  ourselves  to  for 
eign  models,  nor  to  imitate  these  in  any  way, 
but  only  to  use  them,  in  whatever  language 
written,  as  objects  of  study.  We  must  free 
ourselves  of  any  dogmatic  adherence  to  for 
eign  literatures,  whether  these  be  English, 
French,  German  or  Russian — but  be  pre 
pared  to  make  use  of  any  foreign  idea  that 
achieves  our  ends,  in  exactly  the  self-same 
spirit  as  the  men  who  build  the  skyscrapers 
of  New  York  employ  the  elements  of  for 
eign  architectural  styles,  for  a  different  pur 
pose. 

Above  all,  we  must  create  intelligible  the 
ories  of  Art  to  match  our  practice,  and  the 
discussion  and  revision  of  these  theories  must 
proceed  constantly.  It  is  ridiculous  for  any 
one  to  suppose  that  poetry  or  any  other  Art 


110     THE    YOUNG   IDEA 

can  progress  without  criticism,  or  that  in 
the  Elizabethan,  or  any  other  age,  literature 
sprang  spontaneously  from  the  soil.     We 
know  that  this  was  not  the  case.    The  theory 
and  practice  of  English  Poetry  have  ever 
gone  hand  in  hand  since  the  generation  im 
mediately  preceding  the  great  Elizabethans 
— a  generation  whose  ardent  discussion  of 
the  merits  of  rhymed  as  against  classical  and 
rhymeless    metres    closely    resembles    the 
battle  being  waged  about  vers  libre  to-day. 
And  any  opportunity  to  enlarge  the  bounds 
of  discussion  by  defending  whatever  is  novel 
in  one's  own  practice,  should  therefore  be 
welcomed  by  every  serious  American  poet. 

Miss  Amy  Lowell  is  so  well-known  as  the 
apologist  of  the  Imagist  movement  in  this 
country  that  her  paper  requires  no  preface. 
Her  most  recent  books  of  verse  are  "A 
Dome  of  Many-Colored  Glass,"  "Sword 
Blades  and  Poppy  Seed,"  and  "Men, 
Women  and  Ghosts,"  in  addition  to  which 
she  has  published  a  volume  of  criticism,  "Six 
French  Poets," 


THE    ROMANTICISTS     111 

( 1 )  I  think  there  is  distinctly  a  new  move 
ment  today,  but  I  regard  that  movement  as 
especially  evident  in  poetry  at  the  present 
moment.    Prose  is  still  too  much  under  the 
domination   of   magazine   editors   to   have 
broken  away  and  started  anything  very  new. 
Our  prose  writers  are  still  inferior  to  those 
of  England.    Our  poets,  on  the  other  hand, 
are,  I  think,  inferior  to  none  living  today, 
either  in  England  or  in  the  European  coun 
tries. 

(2)  It  is  a  little  difficult  to  say  what  are 
the  ideals  of  a  movement.    (And  in  speaking 
of  the  new  movement  I  shall  confine  myself 
strictly  to  poetry.)     I  should  say  that  the 
ideal  evidenced  in  all  the  better  poetry  to 
day  is  toward  a  great  naturalness  and  sim 
plicity;  a  trend  away  frcm  the  sentimental 
and  pretty-pretty,  which  for  so  long  reigned 
in  American  verse.     The  poets  today  are 
seeking  reality — the  greater  reality,  which 
includes  ideality;  they  are  seeking  it  through 
the  simplicity  and  beauty  of  current  speech ; 
and,  with  a  greater  faith  in  the  universe,  they 


112     THE    YOUNG   IDEA 

find  poetry  in  many  quarters  where  the  older 
poets  did  not  admit  it  to  exist.  The  cur 
rent  discussion  of  forms  shows  a  very  super 
ficial  conception  of  the  new  poetry,  forms 
being  merely  a  means  to  an  end.  The  new 
movement  can  be  found,  not  only  among  the 
vers  librists,  but  among  those  writers  who 
habitually  employ  the  older  forms. 

(3)  It  is  impossible  to  say  which  of  the 
new  currents  of  poetry  seem  to  be  import 
ant.     These  currents  are  like  the  contribu- 
tary  streams  of  a  great  river.    They  are  all 
important  to  the  development  of  the  main 
flow.    So  long  as  they  be  authentic  and  sin 
cere  each  has  its  place. 

(4)  You  ask  me  what  relation  my  own 
work  bears  to  this  movement,  which  is  a 
question  very  difficult  for  anyone  to  answer 
about  oneself.    My  aim  is  for  greater  depth, 
beauty,  sincerity,  and  vividness.     To  that 
end,  I  am  interested  in  many  methods  of 
attaining  it;  but  I  insist  that  poetry  must 
always  be  poetical,   and  I  prefer  that  it 
should  be  dramatic  as  well.    Poetry,  to  my 


THE    ROMANTICISTS     113 

mind,  is  man's  endeavor  to  express,  not  only 
his  emotions,  but  the  highest  beauty  he  ap 
prehends;  and  any  method  is  permissible 
which  conveys  that  emotion  and  that  beauty 
to  the  reader. 

This  does  not,  of  course,  mean  that  readers 
may  not  have  to  be  taught  a  new  idiom.  A 
poet  should  always  be  ahead  of  his  time, 
otherwise  he  is  no  true  seer — in  the  old  sense 
of  the  word,  "to  perceive."  It  is  those  poets 
who  have  been  more  misapprehended  during 
the  time  of  their  writing  who  have  meant 
most  to  succeeding  generations. 

(5)  As  to  my  criticism  of  contemporary 
American  literature — that  is  almost  too  large 
a  subject  to  deal  with  in  a  letter.  The  great 
danger  hitherto  has  been  the  large  prices 
which  popular  magazines  pay  for  the  sort 
of  thing  that  attracts  their  clients.  As 
writers  must  live,  there  has  come  about  a  sort 
of  facile  writing,  built  very  much  upon  one 
pattern,  and  which  is  sure  of  its  audience. 
This  has  done  an  immense  amount  to  injure 
American  literature.  But  it  is  a  natural  and 


THE    YOUNG   IDEA 

healthy  sign  that  the  poets,  possibly  because 
they  have  no  temptation,  have  been  able  to 
free  themselves  from  this  commercial  influ 
ence.  As  poetry  is  the  most  highly  emotion 
alized  of  all  the  forms  of  writing,  it  is  also 
natural  and  proper  that  they  should  be  the 
first  to  break  away  from  a  baneful  influence. 
Doubtless  the  prose  writers  will  follow  their 
lead  before  long.  The  true  poetical  move 
ment  today  must  not  be  confused  with  the 
desire  to  shock  and  surprise  in  some  modern 
verse.  Where  a  few  people  are  sincere  and 
original,  there  will  always  be  a  crowd  of 
imitators  to  follow  them.  Time  alone  can 
sift  the  chaff  from  the  wheat.  But  that  such 
imitators  do  exist  is  no  proof  that  the  more 
serious  of  the  modern  poets  are  not  sincere. 

The  latest  of  the  movements  for  a  wider 
technical  freedom  in  poetry  is  that  brought 
forward  by  the  Spectrists,  a  school  for  which 
Miss  Anne  Knish  and  Mr.  Emanuel  Mor 
gan  stand  as  sponsors.  Miss  Knish  defines 
its  aim  as  a  fresh  interpretation  of  classic 


THE   ROMANTICISTS     115 

gospels.  She  believes  our  present  poetic  re 
nascence  to  be  a  derivation  from  a  stale  cur 
rent. 

I  do  not  know  if  I  have  a  right  to  speak  on 
this  subject,  for  American  poets  will  resent, 
perhaps,  the  criticism  of  one  whose  native 
tongue  is  the  Russian,  and  who  has  written 
only  one  English  book.  Yet  since  you  ask 
me,  I  will  answer,  with  humility,  as  to  poetry 
only. 

Your  new  movement  in  poetry  seems  to 
me  too  closely  derived  from  a  French  move 
ment  that  is  already  ancient  history  to  Con 
tinental  Europe.  Young  people  without 
genius  slip  into  this  stale  current  and  have 
much  fun;  but  many  of  their  tragic  poems 
are  of  humorous  effect,  I  think,  and  when 
they  would  be  funny  I  sometimes  weep.  It 
is  like  a  piece  of  cheese  left  over  at  break-  ^ 
fast.  So  little  is  basically  grounded  on  a 
theory  of  aesthetic  that  is  of  new  import;  and 
these  young  people  fear  the  classic  aesthetic 
as  they  would  poison.  They  need  not; 


116     THE    YOUNG    IDEA 

though  we  seek  new  drinks  to  become 
drunken  with,  the  doctrine  of  Aristoteles  re 
mains  the  staff  of  life,  the  bread. 

We  who  are  of  the  Spectric  School  of 
poets  have  tried,  contradicting  no  ancient 
truth,  to  give  fresh  interpretation  to  classic 
gospels.  If  our  aesthetic  dogma  be  sound, 
the  other  poets  will  before  long  become 
aware.  But  these  are  in  American  poetry 
days  only  of  beginning;  and  I  think  these 
people  know  nothing  of  European  literary 
history  who  speak  so  much  of  "new,  new, 
new!" 

Mr.  Emanuel  Morgan,  collaborator  with 
Miss  Knish  upon  "Spectra,"  tells  us  that 
the  essential  quality  of  Spectric  poetry  is 
humor,  and  defines  its  basis  in  vision. 

Yes,  there  is  a  new,  or,  rather,  renewed 
movement  in  poetry.  Its  ideals  are  life.  It 
is  born  of  the  death  of  the  immediate  past. 
Its  most  important  current,  for  the  moment, 
seems  to  me  to  be  the  current  of  mirth,  and 


THE    ROMANTICISTS     117 

in  that  current  much  of  our  work  belongs. 
We  call  ourselves  a  "School."  But  all  we 
are  doing,  as  I  see  it,  is  to  combine  and 
realize  qualities  which  are  appearing,  now 
here,  now  there,  among  much  modern  poetry 
not  professedly  spectrist,  viz. :  catholicity  of 
subject  and  metre,  a  quick  registering  of 
mental  reflections  by  a  sort  of  leapfrog 
metaphor,  an  exchange  of  intuitions;  in 
short,  by  imagination  or  humor,  a  breaking 
through  the  mere  pretty  or  ugly  surface  of 
things. 

In  our  own  convenient  terms,  spectrism 
belongs  to  its  time  in  that  it  intends  the  poem 
or  spectrum,  by  means  of  laughter  or  other 
illumination,  to  send  an  enchanted  X-ray 
through  the  skin  to  the  lungs  and  liver  and 
heart  of  life. 


THE   IDEALISTS: 

THE    RENASCENCE    OF    SPIRIT 
UALITY 


Ill 

THE  IDEALISTS 

THE  four  poets  here  grouped  as  Idealists 
could  be  more  accurately  described  as  spir 
itualists,  did  not  the  word  spiritualism  con 
vey  a  special  connotation  which  does  not  in 
the  least  apply  to  the  theories  of  these  poets. 
The  idea  which  each  of  them  has  expressed 
is  that  today  we  are  experiencing  a  rena 
scence  of  faith,  that  after  an  era  in  which 
spiritual  experience  was  doubted  and  during 
which  the  soul  was  denied,  the  writers,  as  in 
terpreters  of  the  thought  and  the  feeling  of 
their  time,  have  discovered,  as  the  most  im 
portant  thing  in  life,  the  soul  of  man  and  its 
relation  to  the  absolute. 

They  would  claim  that  literature  which 
does  not  take  into  account  man's  religious 
experience  is  superficial  and  false  to  life. 
121 


122     THE    YOUNG   IDEA 

Their  point  of  view  may  briefly  be  described 
thus:  Science,  in  its  quest  for  a  wholly 
truthful  explanation  of  the  world  in  which 
we  live,  has  achieved  only  a  partial  explana 
tion,  since  it  is  dependent  upon  rational 
proof  in  establishing  the  validity  of  its  doc 
trines.  But  beyond  the  truth  which  science 
has  established,  there  lies  another  body  of 
truth  revealed  to  man  intuitively  in  the  ex 
perience  of  faith.  This  body  of  truth  may 
or  may  not  in  the  future  be  susceptible  of 
rational  proof;  at  present  we  apprehend  it 
only  subjectively  and  intuitively  in  faith. 
And  it  is  this  experience  of  faith  and  its  dis 
covery  of  the  ideal  within  the  real  which  these 
four  writers  believe  to  be  the  most  signifi 
cant  contribution  of  our  life  to-day,  in  its 
expression  in  literature. 

Plato  believed  that  our  joy  in  the  dis 
covery  of  beauty  and  truth  in  the  world  was 
founded  upon  an  unconscious  memory  of  the 
perfect  truth  and  beauty  seen  by  the  soul 
in  its  heavenly  chariot  ride  before  birth.  The 
fable  of  the  heavenly  chariot  ride  was  his 


THE    IDEALISTS        123 

poetic  interpretation  of  the  experience  of 
faith.  And  these  poets,  in  saying  that  the 
highest  art  is  an  expression  of  spiritual  ex 
perience,  and  that  as  such  it  moves  us 
through  our  souls,  are  restating  in  a  modern 
form  the  idealism  of  Plato. 

Mr.  William  Rose  Benet's  gospel  is  one  of 
greater  individualism,  as  against  the  ten 
dency  toward  a  democratization  of  poetry. 
But  his  central  thought  is  of  the  essential 
concern  of  poetry  with  the  things  of  the 
spirit. 

Yes,  I  think  a  new  movement  in  American 
literature  is  making  itself  felt.  It  was  first 
manifested  in  the  field  of  poetry.  The  re 
cent  revival  of  free  verse  and  the  introduc 
tion  of  some  new  cults,  such  as  Imagism, 
have  had,  on  the  whole,  an  invigorating  influ 
ence.  The  point  is  not  that  the  things  now 
being  done  in  verse  are  new,  but  that  they 
have  shaken  awake  the  faculties  of  poets  and 
critics  (widely  apart  as  are  some  of  these  in 


124     THE    YOUNG   IDEA 

their  opinions).  How  much  of  the  flood  of 
contemporary  experimentation  will  remain 
when  the  inevitable  alternating  ebb  sets  in 
is  beyond  anybody  to  say  very  comprehen 
sively.  So  much  for  poetry.  American  fic 
tion  is  now  working  toward  greater  sincerity 
than  in  past  years,  I  think,  having  already 
attained  a  very  high  average  of  technical 
merit.  The  "manner"  has  been  mastered — 
the  "matter"  will  be  more  vital  in  most 
novels  and  short  stories  from  now  on.  At 
least,  such  is  my  particular  faith.  The  ro 
mantic  school  both  in  prose  and  poetry  is  out 
of  fashion  at  present.  I  suppose  my  own 
work  falls  more  into  the  romantic  category 
than  into  the  realistic,  though,  as  far  as  my 
reading  goes,  I  enjoy  Dostoievsky  and  Ed 
gar  Lee  Masters  immensely.  Poetry,  in  my 
opinion,  cannot  escape  a  certain  touch  of 
mysticism.  Prose,  if  desired,  can  dispense 
with  this  element  entirely.  But  the  most 
realistic  poets — and  take  Masters  again,  for 
an  example  (as  he  is,  just  at  present,  the 
cynosure  of  all  eyes) — the  most  realistic  of 


THE    IDEALISTS        125 

poets,  as  Masters,  cannot  wholly  escape  his 
particular  mysticism,  cannot  surrender  him 
self  entirely  to  a  materialistic  or  even  a  ra 
tionalistic  conception  of  the  universe.  This 
has  nothing  to  do  with  his  opinions  upon  or 
ganized  society  or  anything  else — it  is  most 
often  involuntary,  but  nevertheless  creeps 
into  and  most  beautifully  permeates  his 
graver  poems.  Prose  discussion  can  often 
win  through  a  climax  of  glib  denial,  that  con 
vinces  temporarily.  I  feel  that  real  poetry 
cannot — for  our  deepest  thoughts  cannot 
(by  the  nature  of  the  animal!)  deny,  though 
they  may  be  saturated  with  doubt.  Those 
most  truly  poets  are  necessarily  mystics  to 
a  certain  extent — whether  they  like  it  or 
not.  They  do  not  arrive  at  their  conclusions 
by  the  straight  streets  of  logic,  but  by  the 
wandering  roads  of  emotion,  in  spite  of 
themselves  often.  For  one  of  the  necessities 
to  their  being  artists  is,  after  all,  to  be  able 
to  feel  why  a  thing  is  right  or  wrong.  One 
could  reason  it  out  all  day  and,  without  this 
feeling,  which  engenders  the  creative  emo- 


126     THE   YOUNG   IDEA 

tion,  could  have  no  nucleus  in  one's  decisions 
for  any  work  of  art.  Dealing  with  a  me 
dium,  such  as  poetry,  which  depends  mainly 
upon  its  emotion  for  its  greatness,  the  ra 
tionalist  must  be  comparatively  sterile 
unless  his  "reason"  seethes  itself  into  "pas 
sion,"  in  which  case  the  mystical  quality 
enters  again  and  "rationalism"  becomes  a 
misnomer. 

Therefore,  I  do  not  feel  that  our  glib  di 
visions  of  poets  into  romantic  and  realistic 
groups  or  clans  is  any  very  great  matter. 

I  dislike  cliques,  schools,  sects,  and 
"movements"  in  poetry.  There  is  usually 
one  leader  to  each,  who  produces  something. 
The  rest  strive  to  make  themselves  like  the 
leader  and  come  off  as  badly  as  Atherton  in 
"Atherton's  Gambit,"  in  Edwin  Arlington 
Robinson's  poem.  There  is  always  the 
"brains"  of  the  "movement."  In  poetry  the 
"movement"  itself  has  never  mattered,  it  has 
been  the  individual.  It  always  will  be.  You 
cannot  any  more  democratize  poetry  than 
you  can  democratize  a  humming-bird — ex- 


THE    IDEALISTS        127 

cept  in  this  sense,  that  more  people  educate 
their  finer  faculties,  or  get  them  educated, 
as  time  goes  on,  and  so  come  to  look  into  the 
books  that  were  always  under  their  noses. 
Say  to  a  poet  that  he  must  write  about  the 
laboring-man,  the  brothel,  the  tenement,  the 
slaughter-house, — and  you  would  have  him 
immediately  writing  of  all  the  fairy  people 
and  places  and  all  the  mythological  rigama- 
roles  in  the  world — and  serve  you  right! 
But  say  to  a  poet  that  he  must  play  safely 
inside  the  garden  palings  and  you'll  have 
him  running  down  Queer  Street  in  his  night 
shirt,  waving  a  petroleum  torch.  Such  are 
poets — in  other  words,  they  are  strong  indi 
vidualists,  and  when  they  try  to  herd  to 
gether  the  sight  is  just  too  pitiful  for  any 
thing! 

In  closing  I  wish  to  say  that  I  am  not  a 
Whitmanite.  Whitman  was  a  great  writer, 
but  from  the  present  babble  of  all  the  young 
in  America  one  would  think  that  Whitman 
was  the  only  man  who  had  ever  written 
poetry  in  America.  Some  of  the  adulation 


128     THE    YOUNG   IDEA 

is  simply  sickening.  I  wish  some  of  our 
modern  poets  would  stop  quoting  what 
Whitman  thought  about  art  and  life  and 
begin  to  produce  art  and  life  as  they  see  it. 
This  idea  of  "handing  on  the  torch"  is  all 
very  fine — but  I  have  a  lot  more  respect  for 
a  man  who  goes  out  to  the  pine  wood  and 
yanks  off  and  lights  his  own.  I  should  say 
to  the  modern  American  poet  in  general, — 
break  away,  break  away, — get  out  and  exer 
cise  your  own  soul,  refuse  to  be  smothered 
to  death  in  a  clique,  a  group,  a  theory.  Keep 
the  law  of  the  outlier!  It  is  well  that  you 
should  have  to  make  yourself  more  or  less 
useful  to  the  community,  but  keep  your  work 
your  own.  Play  it  lone-handed,  possibly 
wrong-headed, — but  keep  your  work  free, 
individual,  more  than  a  thing  of  barter, — 
quite  outside  and  unafraid  of  styles  or  fash 
ions  or  popular  applause  or  the  lack  of  it. 
The  poet  has  usually  saved  his  soul  in  that 
way  alone. 

Mr.  Joyce  Kilmer  is  known  as  a  poet, 


THE    IDEALISTS        129 

critic  and  essayist.  And  one  of  the  distinc 
tive  qualities  of  his  writings  is  its  discovery 
of  the  beauty  and  the  spirituality  of  common 
life.  And  he  finds  a  spiritual  awakening  to 
be  the  most  important  current  in  contempor 
ary  poetry. 

I  am  not  an  enthusiastic  student  of  liter 
ary  movements,  believing  that  literature  ex 
ists  independent  of  schools  and  cults  and 
coteries,  and  for  the  most  part  uninfluenced 
by  them.  But  I  believe  that  a  certain  change 
is  coming  over  the  philosophies  and  attitudes 
toward  life  of  those  who  make  our  poems 
and  stories,  and  perhaps  an  attempt  to  de 
scribe  this  change  will  be  considered  an  an 
swer  to  your  question. 

The  literature  of  America,  like  the  litera 
ture  of  all  the  rest  of  the  world,  is  progress 
ing  away  from  materialism  toward  idealism. 
Our  writers  are  becoming  aware  of  the  fact 
that  the  subject  of  the  greatest  literature 
must  be  the  soul  of  man,  which  is  the  most 
interesting  thing  in  the  world.  The  day  of 


130     THE   YOUNG   IDEA 

pessimism  and  atheism  and  pseudopaganism 
in  literature  is  past.  A  poet  who  today  de 
voted  his  energies  to  attacking  Christianity, 
as  Swinburne  did,  would  be  unable  to  find 
a  publisher.  Paganism  is  as  dead  as  ping- 
pong  or  as  a  bit  of  the  slang  of  nineteen  hun 
dred  and  six. 

Of  course,  there  are  a  few  writers  who  are 
archaic  and  reactionary.  Mr.  Theodore 
Dreiser  is  a  reactionary  clinging,  as  he  does, 
to  methods  that  were  considered  startling  in 
Zola's  day.  But  Mr.  Dreiser's  books  are 
read  only  by  people  who  are  paid  for  the  task 
by  the  Society  for  the  Suppression  of  Vice. 
Miss  Amy  Lowell  is  a  reactionary,  because 
she  is  still  writing  and  talking  about  Ima- 
gism — a  fad  popular  among  a  few  of  the 
younger  London  poets  back  in  nineteen  thir 
teen.  But  no  one  reads  Miss  Lowell's  writ 
ings — I  have  too  much  respect  for  her  good 
taste  to  believe  that  she  herself  reads  them. 
And  these  two  writers  are  living  anachro 
nisms,  not  actually  related  to  the  literature 
of  our  day. 


THE    IDEALISTS        131 

In  the  United  States,  we  have  so  far  es 
caped  the  stern  discipline  of  the  War,  but 
our  writers  seem,  nevertheless,  to  have 
learned  their  lesson  from  it.  They  have  seen 
the  handwriting  on  the  wall  of  the  world. 
When  Rupert  Brooke  thanked  God  for  the 
cleansing  red  flood  of  battle,  when  he  re 
joiced  in  the  re-birth  of  honor  and  courage 
and  faith  and  for  the  passing  of  "half -men 
and  their  dirty  songs  and  dreary,  and  all  the 
little  emptiness  of  love,"  I  think  that  he 
spoke  for  all  the  writers  of  the  world — for 
those  of  the  United  States  as  well  as  for 
those  of  Europe.  The  late  Emile  Verhgeren 
exemplified  the  same  renascence  of  idealism 
when  he  wrote  his  noble  poem  on  the  shell 
ing  of  Rheims  Cathedral.  He  lamented  the 
desecration  of  the  cathedral  not  because  it 
was  a  magnificent  piece  of  architecture  but 
because  it  was  a  holy  place.  This  feeling  in 
the  heart  of  a  man  who  for  years  had  been 
counted  among  the  enemies  of  religion  was 
greatly  significant.  It  was  not  until  the 
churches  were  actually  under  fire  that  the 


132     THE    YOUNG   IDEA 

"intellectuals"  of  Europe  knew  their  value. 
And  the  writers  of  America  are  getting  this 
lesson  at  second  hand. 

Of  course  our  greatest  living  writers  have 
always  been  idealists — the  Germans  did  not 
need  to  cross  Belgian  soil  to  discover  to  them 
their  own  souls.  In  the  work  of  Anna 
Hempstead  Branch,  Edith  Thomas,  Louise 
Imogen  Guiney  and  our  other  poets  of  au 
thentic  calling,  there  has  always  been  a 
radiant  idealism,  a  joyous  recognition  of  life 
transcending  life.  Impressionistic  critics 
call  E.  A.  Robinson  a  pessimist,  but  the 
careful  student  of  his  poetry  knows  that  it 
consists  merely  of  a  series  of  intensely  inter 
esting  and  beautifully  phrased  questions,  all 
having  the  same  answer,  that  answer  being 
God.  Those  of  our  prose  writers  who  have 
achieved  most  success — who  have  been  most 
widely  read  and  are  most  likely  to  continue 
to  be  read,  are  idealists.  Imagine  what 
worse-than-Zola  O.  Henry  would  have  writ 
ten,  could  he,  like  Zola,  have  seen  only  flesh 
and  blood  and  brains !  But  he  was  a  student 


THE    IDEALISTS        133 

of  the  souls  of  men  and  women,  and,  there 
fore,  he  will  be  read  by  generations  who 
never  will  hear  the  names  of  Artzibasheff's 
American  imitators. 

And  since  nineteen  fourteen  there  has  been 
noticeable  in  the  literature  produced  in  this 
country,  especially  in  the  poetry,  a  sort  of 
spiritual  frankness  that  is  an  encouraging 
sign.  I  think  that  the  publication  of  Mar- 
jorie  Pickthall's  "Mary  Shepherdess,"  in 
Scribner's  for  Christmas  nineteen  fifteen,  of 
Margaret  Widdemer's  "The  Old  Road  to 
Paradise,"  in  one  of  Mr.  Hearst's  most 
widely  circulated  magazines,  and  perhaps  of 
the  long  poem  by  Ridgeley  Torrence  in 
Scribner's  for  December,  nineteen  sixteen, 
are  startling  signs  of  the  times.  Much  water 
— much  blood-stained  water  has  flowed 
under  the  bridge  since  Professor  Henry 
Augustin  Beers  wrote  that  nine  days'  won 
der,  "The  Dying  Pantheist,"  or  whatever  it 
was  called.  No  magazine  of  reputation 
would  print  that  poem  today. 

I    do   not   think   that    writers    lead   the 


134     THE    YOUNG    IDEA 

thought  of  their  time,  I  think  that  they  re 
flect  and  interpret  it.  The  world  today  is 
forgetting  all  its  fads  and  isms  and  pictur 
esque  heresies  and  returning  to  its  primitive 
faith.  Francis  Thompson  predicted  this, 
years  ago  in  his  strange  and  beautiful  poem 
"Lilium  Regis."  Our  writers — except  those 
who  willfully  separate  themselves  from  the 
life  around  them — are  recording  and  ex 
plaining  and  celebrating  this  return  which  is 
a  most  glorious  advance. 

Miss  Josephine  Preston  Peabody  is  catK- 
olic  in  allowing  the  poet  all  freedoms.  She 
finds  the  most  significant  tendency  of  mod 
ern  poetry  in  its  rediscovery  of  the  spirit 
through  suffering. 

1.    Is  there  a  new  movement  in  poetry 
today  in  this  country? 

No.  I  should  say  there  is  an  eddy.  It  is 
related  to  movement,  or  progress,  as  a  side- 
eddy  is  related  to  the  main  current  of  a  river. 
That  is  to  say:  To  my  mind  all  real  progress 


THE    IDEALISTS        135 

in  art  or  life  means  a  wider  and  intenser  con 
sciousness.  For  that,  two  things  are  indis 
pensable:  analysis  and  synthesis.  There  is 
a  new  style  (not  movement)  in  poetry  which 
represents  the  analytic  element,  with  its  joy 
in  the  discovery  or  re-discovery  of  certain 
tools  of  poetic  expression,  not  apparently 
ready  to  its  mind  or  hand,  before.  The  syn 
thetic  impulse  which  would  relate  this  new 
impulse  to  the  past  (and  which  will,  in  timey 
seems  to  be  lacking  at  present  to  most  of  the 
prophets  of  the  New  Style. 

I  call  this  an  eddy,  because  it  is  incident 
to  the  natural  growth  and  onwardness  of 
poetry;  also  because  I  think  its  chief  use  is 
Disturbance ;  Disturbance  as  a  stimulus.  In 
other  words,  the  animated  contention  over  all 
the  terms  of  poetry  which  of  late  has  filled 
so  much  space  in  the  magazines,  has  also 
served  to  set  many  persons  (disinterested 
and  uninterested)  questioning  poetry,  what 
the  thing  may  be;  even  as,  while  the  world 
endures,  any  indication  of  a  street-fight  will 
draw  a  crowd. 


136     THE   LYOUNG   IDEA 

2.     What  are  its  ideals? 

Its  ideals,  I  should  say,  as  far  as  ideals  are 
shareable  among  any  company  of  human  be 
ings,  are  precisely  the  ideals  that  have  moved 
men  to  expression  since  time  began:  viz., 
the  sense  of  Life ;  the  passion  to  express  Life, 
as  it  is  or  as  it  feels ;  the  deep  disinclination 
to  take  Life  at  hearsay;  and  an  abounding 
enthusiasm  for  the  newest  tools  that  suits 
the  hand  of  the  craftsman. 

The  differences  from  this  generality  must 
be  set  forth  by  the  exponents  of  "New 
Style."  My  own  and  only  source  of  dis 
agreement  with  prophets  of  this  particular 
freedom,  is  my  conviction  that  they  are  not 
free  enough ;  and  that  they  will  allow  no  man 
freedoms  of  his  own. 

3.     What  relation  does  it  bear  to  the  imme 
diate  past?^ 

The  belief  that  it  is  a  revolution.    As  a 
matter  of  fact,  it  would  seem  to  be  a  very 


THE    IDEALISTS        137 

natural  activity,  having  its  freshest  roots  in 
the  rousing  challenge  of  Walt  Whitman, 
enriched  and  stimulated  of  late,  by  the 
craftsmanship,  and  the  joy  in  their  secret, 
of  several  striking  French  artists  and  their 
able  fellows,  here  and  in  England. 

4.     Which  of  many  currents  seem  to  you 
the  most  important? 

I  think  there  are  not  many  currents. 
There  are  many  individuals;  there  are  even 
more  individualists.  Setting  aside  all  minor 
confusions  of  method  and  manner,  the  gen 
eral  movement  of  poetry  still  divides,  as  art 
has  always  done  (where  there  is  division)  — 
and  Man  has  always  done,  when  he  has  felt 
as  a  house  divided  against  itself, — into  body 
and  soul.  Normally  or  synthesized,  the  Man 
is  one.  But  these  eddies  of  consciousness 
make  twain  of  him  very  naturally ;  and  in  our 
own  country  at  present,  the  two  currents  of 
artistic  ideal  express  this  temporary  parting. 
One  takes  account  of  Man  chiefly  through 
his  soul, — as  we  still  find  it  useful  to  call 


138     THE   LYOUNG   IDEA 

the  Live-Thing- Within,  that  makes  him 
walk  and  see.  The  other  deals  with  the  ex 
ternals,  the  passing  chances,  the  things 
walked  by,  the  things  seen;  taking  no  ac 
count  or  rather,  trying  not  to  take  account 
of  that  Live-Thing- Within,  the  seer. 

Naturally,  the  Live-Thing- Within  seems 
to  me  the  thing  which  gives  significance  as 
well  as  sight  to  the  man;  to  his  limner,  and 
to  the  tools  chosen  by  that  fellow-workman 
to  carry  out  his  design. 

Even  the  most  contentious  artists  are  apt 
to  agree  that  Art  interprets  Life.  They 
disagree  perpetually  as  to  what  Life  may  be ; 
and  as  to  the  variety  and  fitness  of  one  an 
other's  tools. 

But,  inasmuch  as  present-day  life  is  dis 
covering  to  Europe,  through  suffering,  the 
soul  it  had  come  to  doubt,  I  think  the  most 
significant  Art  of  today  is  the  art  that  bears 
witness  to  this  suffering,  this  discovery,  this 
painful  birth  of  a  triumphing  Spirit. 

5.     What  relation  does  your  own  work  bear 
to  this  new  movement? 


THE    IDEALISTS        139 

rA  merely  human  relation:  inasmuch  as  all 
sincere  and  unified  work  is  a  spontaneous 
growth  of  one's  own  spirit,  regardless  of 
what  others  are  doing  or  are  like  to  do.  Ar 
tistic  beliefs  are  as  different  in  color  as  re 
ligions;  and  there  are  as  many  religions  as 
there  are  individuals. 

I  am  for  all  freedoms;  even  other  peo 
ple's.  I  am  also  for  all  manner  of  symme 
tries,  rhythms,  and  musics  (overflowing  with 
delight  for  me)  that  might  strike  other  minds 
as  bonds  for  them.  A  new  method  seems 
to  me  preposterous  only  (but  always)  when 
it  proposes  to  "displace"  some  heritage  of 
beauty,  that  has  survived  by  virtue  of  beauty, 
from  the  indifferent  past.  The  past,  be  it 
noted,  is  not  with  us  to  serve  as  curator  of 
that  heritage,  so  often  referred  to  by  con 
temporary  writers  as  an  archaeological  dis 
play.  As  if  a  water-lily  must  needs  displace 
the  rose. 

My  working  faith  is  this:  To  the  work 
man,  his  choice  of  tools.  To  the  reader,  his 
own  delights. 


140     THE   YOUNG   IDEA 

6.     What  is  your  criticism  of  present  litera 
ture? 

That  is, — when  it  is  voice  without  spirit? 

Too  little  heart  for  Real  Life,  in  spite  of 
the  flourish  of  trumpets.  Too  little  courage 
to  face  the  mysteries  of  the  dark,  with  so  few 
earnings  in  its  pocket. — No  real  fortitude; 
or  little.  Struggle  it  can  bear,  and  welcome ; 
but  not  silence  or  solitude.  It  can  attack: 
it  cannot  face  a  siege.  It  is  rich  in  bragging 
body.  It  is  feeble  of  vision. 

I  might  sum  up  all,  with  a  flouting  word 
of  little-sister  brevity: — "Talk  less. — Sing 


more." 


Mr.  Ridgely  Torrence  likewise  finds  us  to 
be  in  a  period  of  spiritual  regeneration. 
And  he  points  out  that  unless  vision  con 
trols  the  poet,  his  work  is  worthless. 

Surely  there  can  be  but  one  ideal  and  that 
must  be  held  by  each  individual  writer, 
namely:  to  express  the  truth  that  is  in  him 
or  her. 


THE    IDEALISTS        141 

A  time  of  visions  and  renewed  faith  is  be 
ginning  faintly  to  dawn  and  this  is  not  un- 
rumoured  among  Americans. 

If  there  are  many  "currents"  in  this 
"movement,"  I  am  not  concerned  with  which 
is  the  most  important,  I  am  only  interested 
in  what  a  writer  has  to  say.  If  he  has,  in  the 
highest  sense,  something  to  say,  he  will  not 
reveal  it  until  it  has  been  wholly  fused  in  the 
fires  of  his  heart  and  imagination  and  then 
it  will  be  expressed  in  its  inevitable  and  per 
fect  form.  One  might  pursue  this,  but  a  sin 
gle  example  will  serve:  Emerson  knew  but 
one  or  two  tunes,  and  those  doggerel  ones, 
but  by  virtue.of  his  burning  secret  his  penny 
pipes  gave  forth  a  glorious  poetry,  the  dis 
tilled  essence  of  song. 


THE   PESSIMISTS 


IV 
THE  PESSIMISTS 

PESSIMISM,  we  are  told  by  the  Standard 
Dictionary,  is  a  disposition  to  take  a  gloomy 
view  of  affairs.  No  other  word  so  closely 
approximates  the  attitude  taken  by  these 
four  writers  toward  our  contemporary  liter 
ature.  One  tells  us  that  today  we  are  upon 
the  eve  of  birth,  and  implies  that  the  con 
temporary  movement  in  literature  is  the  first 
evidence  of  a  future  parturition,  but  that,  of 
itself,  it  has  accomplished  nothing.  Another 
tells  us  that  there  is  nothing  to  distinguish 
American  literature  from  English  literature. 
And  both  of  the  remaining  two  see  no  evi 
dence  of  any  significant  movement  in  the 
writing  that  is  being  done  today. 

Mr.  Benjamin  DeCasseres  explains  his 
145 


146     THE    YOUNG    IDEA 

own  work.    And  he  tells  us  what  is  wrong 
with  our  literature. 


There  is  undoubtedly  a  new  movement 
in  our  literature  today.  We  are  on  the 
eve  of  Birth.  There  are  no  ideals  that 
I  can  perceive.  It  is  wildly  spontaneous, 
individualistic  and  anarchic.  Its  relation 
to  the  immediate  past  will,  I  think,  be 
a  complete  demolition  of  the  stupidities 
and  puritanism  that  have  ossified  us  and 
petrified  us.  Its  watchword  will  be  Liberty. 
My  own  work  is  destructive  and  bears  no  re 
lation  to  the  past  American  literature.  As 
I  am  an  imaginative  ironist  and  a  mystical 
pessimist,  my  roots  are  in  the  Latin  civiliza 
tion  of  Europe,  though  I  count  among  my 
forebears  Poe  and  Walt  Whitman. 

Imagination,  irony  and  the  superb  amoral 
ism  of  Greece — that  is  what  my  work  stands 
for,  and  it  is  that  that  I  hope  to  see  dominate 
the  Coming  Age  in  this  country.  The  nine 
vital  books  (poetry,  essay,  satire,  short  stor 
ies,  epigrams,  philosophical  paragraphs  and 


THE    PESSIMISTS      147 

confessions)  which  I  have  written,  and  which 
no  publisher  as  yet  will  publish,  are,  because 
of  their  rejection,  an  indictment  against  the 
enormous  stupidity  of  the  status  quo  here  in 
America.  My  own  work  is  epochal  in  Amer 
ican  literature;  but  I  cannot  compete  with 
the  hopeless  sissification  of  our  college-rid 
den  publishing  houses  and  magazines. 

Today  the  symbol  of  American  literature 
should  be  a  teething  ring ;  tomorrow  I  hope  it 
will  be  two  eagles  ridden  by  Lucifer  and 
Aphrodite. 

Mr.  Floyd  Dell,  one  of  the  editors  of 
The  Masses,  claims  that  we  have  no  truly 
national  literature. 

(1)  "Our  literature" — if  you  mean  by 
that  American  literature,  there  isn't  any 
such  thing  as  distinguished  from  English 
literature.  In  the  United  States,  the  maga 
zine  has  a  more  powerful  and  more  dis 
astrous  influence  than  in  England,  where 
fiction  is  still  written  for  readers  of 


148     THE    YOUNG   IDEA 

books.  But  there  are  signs  that  Amer 
ican  fiction  is  bursting  its  magazine  bounds. 
The  most  significant  influence  upon  Ameri 
can  writing  seems  to  be  the  example  of  H.  G. 
Wells  and  the  half  dozen  other  Englishmen 
who  are  trying  to  draw  true  pictures  of  life. 
(2)  The  ideal  of  the  newer  kind  of  writers 
in  this  country  is  to  depict  America  as  they 
see  it — a  sufficiently  good  ideal,  and  one 
that,  fortunately,  the  magazines  are  pretty 
much  in  sympathy  with.  (3)  "The  imme 
diate  past,"  I  take  it,  is  the  historical  novel. 
It  was,  I  suppose,  Frank  Norris  who  ushered 
in  the  new  era.  Our  relation  to  the  historical 
novel  past  consists  in  our  having  grown  up. 
But  why  try  to  create  "periods"?  There 
have  nearly  always  been  people  in  the  United 
States  who  tried  to  tell  the  truth  about  what 
they  saw.  (4)  If  there  must  be  "currents," 
let  us  say  there  is  a  current  setting  toward 
"style"  and  another  current  setting  toward 
"journalism."  I  am  in  sympathy  with  the 
latter.  (6)  American  fiction  seems  to  me  in 
the  main  too  morally  provincial. 


THE    PESSIMISTS      149 

Mr.  Donald  Marquis  is  a  poet  who  is  also 
a  novelist  and  satirist.  His  own  modest  ap 
praisal  of  his  work  does  not  do  it  justice. 
His  "Cruise  of  the  Jasper  B.,"  and  espe 
cially  his  "Hermione,"  a  collection  of  satiric 
essays  upon  the  contemporary  mind,  are  de 
lightful  contributions  to  our  recent  writing. 
His  column,  "The  Sun  Dial,"  in  the  New 
York  Evening  Sun,  offers  an  asylum  to 
many  young  poets,  and  is  an  excellent  ex 
ample  of  the  new  literary  current  in  Ameri 
can  journalism. 

(1)  There  are  many  experiments,  fads, 
imitations  of  European  authors,  minor  inno 
vations,  but  I  see  nothing  of  sufficient  bulk 
or  significance  to  deserve  being  called  the 
new  movement;  or  in  the  sense  that  the  Im 
pressionist  painters  inaugurated  a  new  move-' 
ment,  or  in  the  sense  that  Wagner's  music 
was  new  movement. 

This  also  disposes  of  questions  2,  3  and  4. 

(5)  My  own  work  doesn't  amount  to  a 
tinker's  dam  in  relation  to  anything  import- 


150     THE   YOUNG   IDEA 

ant.    I'm  only  getting  started,  and  have  a 
disinclination  towards  kidding  myself. 

(6)  Contemporary  American  literature 
is  all  right  .  .  .  what  there  is  of  it.  If  I 
had  a  sure  recipe  for  making  more  of  it,  I 
wouldn't  tell  anybody;  I'd  use  the  recipe  in 
my  business.  But  there  are  no  recipes,  and 
can  be  none.  There  are  only  men  who  have 
power,  and  men  who  lack  power.  The  men 
who  lack  power  cluster  around  the  men  who 
have  power  .  .  .  and  that  is  all  a  movement 
is. 

Mr.  John  Curtis  Underwood  is  a  poet  and 
critic.  He  bases  his  adverse  criticism  of  our 
contemporary  literature  upon  certain  condi 
tioning  factors  in  our  national  life  which  he 
believes  to  be  responsible  for  making  our 
psychology  what  it  is. 

In  "The  Research  Magnificent,"  H.  G. 
Wells  has  said  something  about  an  imagi 
nary  effort  to  organize  the  best  thought  of 
the  world  through  the  mediums  of  special- 


THE   PESSIMISTS      151 

ized  effort  and  printing  house  propaganda. 
In  an  earlier  novel  he  has  laid  stress  on  an 
insistent  need  for  "resonators,"  people  of 
normal  intelligence  and  culture  capable  in 
one  way  or  another  of  receiving  and  trans 
mitting  human  progress  in  terms  of  art  and 
science  and  socialized  and  efficient  good  will. 
During  the  last  three  or  four  years,  progress 
in  these  directions  in  North  America,  taken 
as  a  whole,  seems  to  me  backward  rather  than 
forward. 

Any  trend  of  thought  and  feeling  as  vast 
in  its  superficial  extent,  as  barren  in  its  posi 
tive  results,  so  far,  cannot  be  judged,  con 
demned  or  inspired  independently  of  the  en 
vironment  that  produces  it  and  which  it  re 
flects,  however  trivially  and  commercially. 
It  cannot  be  judged  constructively  without 
some  taking  of  contributing  testimony  from 
its  sister  arts  of  the  drama,  the  moving  pic 
ture  and  American  book  and  magazine  illus 
tration,  popularly  patronized  and  exploited 
from  Broadway  to  Los  Angeles.  It  cannot 
continue  to  be  written  and  printed  (not  even 


152     THE   .YOUNG   IDEA 

by  its  rarest  and  strongest;  its  finest  and 
most  efficient  producers  and  distributors) 
free  from  the  inevitable  reaction  upon  it  of 
the  manners  and  customs,  the  commercial 
and  civic  immorality,  the  mean  average  in 
telligence  and  the  culture  rudimentary  or 
otherwise  of  the  millions  who  read,  as  well 
as  the  hundreds  or  the  thousands  who  write 
or  who  edit.  It  cannot  continue  to  represent 
and  misrepresent  the  incompatible  national, 
pacificistic  and  socialistic  ideals  variously  in 
dulged  in  by  100,000,000  people  loosely 
grouped  together  by  conventional  legal  and 
police  protection  without  abandoning,  sooner 
or  later,  one  very  traditional  and  American 
attitude  of  academic  neutrality  toward  the 
problems  of  the  masses  and  the  classes  in 
America  (which  very  definitely  includes 
Mexico  today)  and  the  rest  of  the  world  on 
the  other  side  of  the  Atlantic  and  Pacific 
Oceans. 

For  the  vast  majority  of  the  American 
public  who  indirectly  produce  and  modify 
American  journalism  and  literature  today  as 


THE   PESSIMISTS      153 

no  publisher's  following  or  look  to  local  co 
terie  ever  has  done  or  will  do,  the  literary 
center  of  America  continues  to  be  the  hotel, 
railroad  station  and  street  corner  newsstand, 
quite  as  definitely  and  extravagantly  as  it 
did  more  than  three  years  ago  when  the  fol 
lowing  paragraphs  of  the  preface  to  my  Lit 
erature  and  Insurgency  were  written. 

Criticism  of  literature  per  se  is  a  lost  art 
in  America  today.  Tomorrow  or  the  day  af 
ter  it  will  come  back  as  an  exact  science  and 
part  of  a  constructive  insurgent  revolt 
against  machine-made  and  slipshod  condi 
tions  in  literature  and  in  the  life  that  litera 
ture  interprets. 

Any  American  criticism  that  is  fit  to  sur 
vive  or  worthy  of  the  name,  must  recognize 
that  authors,  editors,  publishers,  malefactors 
of  great  and  lesser  circulation  and  all  their 
works,  are  to  be  classed  essentially  as  prod 
ucts  of  environment  and  forces  that  react  on 
the  same,  and  so  dealt  with. 

The  fact  that  muck-raking  has  been  made 
profitable  and  that  our  muck-raking  maga- 


154     THE   LYOUNG   IDEA 

zines  have  proved  their  fitness  to  survive  and 
to  adapt  themselves  to  American  needs  and 
ideals  of  today,  represents  the  most  import 
ant  economic  advance  of  the  last  fifty  years. 

Sooner  or  later  in  the  present  campaign 
of  education,  in  the  new  reorganization  and 
realignment  of  our  mental  and  moral  as 
sets  and  liabilities,  our  present  system  of  lit 
erary  and  journalistic  production  and  dis 
tribution  is  due  to  come  in  for  its  full  share 
of  muck-raking  and  constructive  criticism. 

The  series  of  articles  on  The  American 
Newspaper,  by  Will  Irwin,  published  in 
Collier's  Weekly  during  the  summer  of  1911, 
sufficiently  foreshadows  this  tendency.  A 
similar  series  of  articles  on  The  American 
Magazines  by  an  author  of  equal  reputa 
tion.,  inspired  by  an  equal  passion  for  speak 
ing  the  truth  without  fear  or  favor  to  any 
one,  might  prove  quite  as  much  to  the  point. 

If  our  journalism,  like  the  machine  poli 
tics  that  it  represents,  is  our  most  crying  na 
tional  disgrace  today ;  if  numbers  of  our  yel 
lowest  journals  and  the  smuggest  and  most 


THE    PESSIMISTS      155 

conventionally  respectable  of  the  American 
press  "higher  up"  are  the  mouthpieces  of 
Big  Business,  and  directly  or  indirectly  its 
paid  prostitutes  and  liars,  the  very  cynicism 
of  their  open  immorality  has  served  to  di 
vert  public  attention  from  other  vital  fac 
tors  in  the  formative  processes  of  American 
thought  and  literary  and  social  morality, 
that  in  the  long  run  cannot  and  will  not 
be  disregarded. 

Any  office  boy  that  reads  and  reflects,  that 
has  any  adequate  sense  of  literary  values  in 
the  up-to-date  output  of  the  American  pub 
lic  library  and  magazine  world,  that  has  any 
real  appreciation  of  the  editorials  and  the 
best  fiction  in  both  The  Popular  Magazine 
and  The  Saturday  Evening  Post;  can,  if  so 
inclined,  frankly  characterize  and  criticise 
the  woman  -  produced  -  read  -  and  -  catered  -  to  - 
literature  of  the  day  and  hour  in  America,  in 
terms  that  might  well  make  Washington  Ir 
ving,  Lowell,  Lanier,  Emerson  and  Haw 
thorne  turn  over  in  their  graves  and  gasp. 

At  the  same  time  it  takes  a  social  and  lit- 


156     THE    YOUNG   IDEA 

erary  vivisector  of  the  first  order  like  David 
Graham  Phillips  to  reveal  the  pretenses  and 
the  posturings  of  the  "good"  woman  of 
America — the  conscious  and  unconscious  lit 
erary  and  artistic  snobbery  of  the  socially 
eligible  and  refined  partners,  wives,  mothers, 
daughters  and  sisters  of  our  most  prominent 
malefactors  of  great  wealth,  and  their  subor 
dinates  and  trade  rivals — for  exactly  what 
they  are  worth. 

Poetry  that  is  real,  that  is  fit  to  survive 
through  the  centuries,  needs  no  defence. 
Like  truth,  the  very  vital  color  of  whose  voice 
it  is,  it  rises  triumphant  from  each  defeat 
to  summon  men  and  women  to  greater 
heights  of  aspiration,  to  greater  intensities 
and  charities  of  common  humanity  shared 
and  exalted.  Such  poetry  is  ready  for  the 
making  in  America  today.  Great  poetry 
like  all  great  literature  is  born  of  storm  and 
stress  in  the  individual  or  the  community. 

There  never  was  a  time  in  the  history  of 

*^j 

the  world  when  the  material  of  such  poetry, 
so  rich  and  complex  in  its  color  scheme,  so 


THE    PESSIMISTS      157 

potent  and  vital  in  its  content  and  inspira 
tion,  lay  so  close  at  hand  beneath  the  eyes  too 
blind  to  see  it,  as  in  America,  the  melting 
pot  of  the  nations,  today. 

And  there  never  was  a  century  in  the  his 
tory  of  man's  long  struggle  upward  from  the 
brute,  when  the  heart  and  soul  of  a  great  na 
tion  were  so  restlessly  expectant  of  some 
spiritual  message,  something  of  lasting  and 
significant  value  in  prose  or  verse,  to  give 
charm,  color  and  power  to  the  dreariness 
and  debauchery  of  everyday,  workaday  ex 
istence,  as  the  beginning  of  this  Twentieth 
Century  and  the  present  month,  week,  day 
and  hour  of  this  year  of  grace  in  convention 
ally  Christian  America. 

Poetry  and  prose  of  this  order  of  distinc 
tion  the  System  that  dominates  literary 
America  has  denied  us ;  and  it  is  not  too  much 
to  say  that  if  fifty  per  cent  of  our  most  mis- 
representative  American  magazines  for  the 
high  brow  and  the  man  in  the  street  alike 
and  some  ninety  per  cent  of  their  parasites 
and  prostitutes,  their  numerous  head-line 


158     THE   YOUNG   IDEA 

contributors,  could  be  blotted  out  of  exist 
ence  tomorrow,  the  American  people  as  a 
whole  would  be  better  rather  than  worse  off. 

This  is  said  in  all  charity  to  literary  pro 
ducers,  publishers,  middlemen,  agents,  edi 
tors,  and  sub-editors  who,  like  their  readers, 
have  not  the  brains,  the  courage  and  the  ca 
pacity  to  free  themselves  from  false  posi 
tions,  and  who  remain  equally  the  victims  of 
the  machine  rule  that  today  dominates  every 
department  of  American  life  and  literature. 

Outside  the  slum  and  the  university,  the 
misdirected  and  ineffectual  energies  of  our 
conventional  churches,  the  defective  working 
of  our  free  public  educational  system,  and 
the  tentative  efforts  of  a  few  public  libraries, 
mental  and  moral  conservatism  of  the  indi 
vidual  and  the  race  is  an  undiscovered  coun 
try  to  the  mass  of  the  American  people 
today. 

Men  like  Norris  and  Phillips  have  begun 
to  unmask  its  vistas.  The  muck-rake  maga 
zines  have  revealed  the  exceeding  grimness 
of  its  frontier. 


THE   PESSIMISTS      159 

But  in  general  we  remain  as  we  have  been 
since  the  American  pioneer  learned  to  dom 
inate  the  forest,  the  prairie,  the  desert,  the 
mountains  and  the  rivers  by  machinery,  and 
in  turn  suffered  the  machinery  that  he  had 
evolved  to  dominate  him ;  and  we  exist  today 
a  machine-made  people,  conventionalized, 
standardized,  commercialized  as  to  our  food, 
clothes,  houses,  homes,  offices,  factories, 
theaters;  amusements,  social  wants,  pleas 
ures  and  obligations;  working  plans;  civic 
and  social  responsibilities,  local  and  na 
tional  pride,  and  its  absence  or  perver 
sion. 

If  a  large  fraction  of  the  American  people 
are  systematically  sweated  and  underfed, 
underpaid  and  overcharged,  crowded  into 
cars  like  cattle,  and  housed  in  dwellings 
where  noise,  dirt,  infection  and  the  extremes 
of  heat  and  cold  are  variable  quantities,  al 
ways  to  be  met  and  fought  with,  not  in  the 
slums  alone;  obviously  the  physical  stamina 
and  morals  of  the  race  must  in  the  long  run 
suffer,  while  the  mean  mental  and  moral  level 


160     THE    YOUNG   IDEA 

must  at  the  same  time  be  brutalized  and  de 
based. 

Today  we  have  our  pure  food  law  and  its 
evasions,  demonstrations  of  one  sort  or  an 
other  against  the  meat  trust  and  the  coal 
trust,  and  the  present  perplexities  of  our 
public  utilities  commission. 

Similarly,  corporate  aggressions  against 
the  public  domains  and  organized  looting  of 
water,  forest,  and  mineral  rights  have  finally 
resulted  in  a  national  programme  of  conser 
vation  in  things  material. 

We  have  not  yet  reached  the  point  of  de 
manding  a  pure  thought  law,  a  legal  re 
striction  of  the  yellowest  phases  of  our  yel 
low  journalism,  or  a  national  movement  for 
the  conservation  of  literary  opportunity  and 
reward,  and  of  the  comparatively  small  pro 
portion  of  his  or  her  time  that  the  average 
American  can  or  will  devote  to  any  printed 
matter  that  is  not  mere  journalism  or  the 
news  of  the  day. 

Such  a  movement  is  bound  to  come  some 
time.  It  will  depend  when  it  does  come  far 


THE    PESSIMISTS      161 

more  on  the  canons  of  sound  and  scientific 
criticism  of  literature  and  life  in  the  largest 
sense,  than  on  any  possible  or  impossible  ar 
bitrary  legal  enactment. 

At  the  same  time,  if  any  protective  tariff 
is  at  all  desirable  or  legitimate  at  any  period 
of  American  growth,  the  details  of  an  amend 
ment  to  our  national  copyright  law  exacting 
a  national  tax  in  the  form  of  a  cumulative 
royalty  on  every  copyrighted  foreign  book 
and  serial  publication  of  recent  date,  and 
the  requirement  of  copyright  registration 
and  similar  cumulative  royalties  in  the  case 
of  foreign  plays  produced  on  the  American 
stage,  might  be  arranged  easily  enough,  once 
the  mass  of  the  American  people  made  up 
its  mind  that  such  a  state  of  things  was 
desirable,  and  determined  to  have  it. 

Such  a  remedy  might  be  far  from  ideal ;  at 
any  rate,  it  could  hardly  leave  American  lit 
erature  and  the  American  stage  in  a  worse 
state  than  that  in  which  we  find  them  both 
today. 

It  would  at  least  relieve  us  of  the  commer- 


162     THE    LYOUNG    IDEA 

cialized  immoralities  and  hysterics  of  im 
ported  Elinor  Glyns  and  the  Marie  Corellis, 
and  leave  us  the  power  to  deal  adequately 
with  our  own  Chamberses  and  McCutcheons. 

It  might  reduce  local  consumption  of 
Materlinck,  Shaw  and  Chesterton.  It  might 
at  the  same  time  stimulate  the  production 
of  essentially  American  playwrights,  poets, 
novelists,  essayists  and  critics. 

It  would  at  least  help  to  stimulate  our 
racial  sense  of  ultimate  destiny  in  the  world 
of  thought  and  of  literature,  and  our  national 
acceptance  of  the  fact  that  literature,  like 
all  other  human  phenomena,  is  distinctly  a 
product  of  environment  in  the  material,  as 
well  as  the  spiritual  sense. 

During  the  last  forty  months  my  persua 
sion  of  America's  immediate  emergence  to 
ward  ultimate  destiny  and  her  general  rec 
ognition  of  any  vital  need  of  the  inspiration 
that  poetry  and  literature  in  general  achieves 
has  been  more  or  less  modified.  Super 
ficially,  we  have  gone  from  bad  to  worse,  by 
machinery,  in  world's  record  time.  This  may 


THE    PESSIMISTS      163 

be  merely  the  recurrent  and  material  sag  in 
the  wave  of  human  progress,  whose  crest, 
even  today,  demands  generations  and  cen 
turies  of  striving  toward.  This  small  item 
on  the  credit  side  of  the  account  remains ;  in 
the  history  of  the  literature  of  eve;  y  lost  na 
tion  once  worthy  to  have  a  history  and  a  lit 
erature,  the  period  immediately  preceding 
final  national  decadence  and  fall  was  that  of 
the  finest  flowering  of  the  art  and  literature 
in  question.  This  may  bel  true  today  of 
Belgium,  also  unprepared  to  a  certain  ex 
tent.  (In  Belgium's  case  we,  like  the  rest  of 
the  world,  are  still  entitled  to  have  our 
doubts.  In  our  own  case,  it  is  hard  to  believe 
that  Robert  W.  Chambers,  Henry  James, 
Harold  Bell  Wright,  George  Sylvester  Vie- 
rick,  Gertrude  Atherton  and  Marjorie  Ben- 
ton  Cooke  any  more  fully,  firmly  and  finally 
represent  or  misrepresent  us  than  William 
Jennings  Bryan,  Henry  Ford,  Woodrow 
Wilson,  Josephus  Daniels  and  Newton  D. 
Baker  do.) 

In  the  meantime,  we  are  assured  by  publi- 


164     THE    YOUNG   IDEA 

cists  of  one  brand  or  another  that  there  is  a 
new  movement  toward  a  new  and  larger  free 
dom  in  art  and  literature  as  well  as  life. 
Probably  there  was  some  such  movement  in 
Babel  just  before  the  confusion  of  tongues 
was  achieved,  and  the  work  of  the  first  sky 
scraper  on  record  was  brought  to  an  abrupt 
conclusion.  If  our  literary  and  artistic  inter 
pretations  have  so  far  failed  to  measure  up 
to  our  skyscrapers  and  their  builders,  and 
the  builders  of  the  foundations  on  which 
those  skyscrapers  were  reared ;  it  may  be  the 
world's  loss  no  less  than  ours.  Again,  it  may 
not  be.  Literary  publishers  and  producers 
seem  to  take  temporary  ebulliences  of  inter 
est  and  inversions  of  technic  in  American 
poetry,  like  American  painting  today,  en 
tirely  too  seriously.  One  is  led  to  suspect  a 
certain  commercialism,  not  to  say  cynicism, 
in  certain  publishers  and  art  dealers — to  go 
no  further — in  this  respect.  And  for  the 
mass  of  intelligent  American  readers  and 
appreciators,  the  new  poetry,  like  the  new 
art  in  America,  which  has  begun  by  claim- 


THE    PESSIMISTS      165 

ing  everything  (and  so  assumed  a  very  con 
siderable  burden  of  proof),  has  yet,  save  in 
the  case  of  sporadic  and  technical  instances, 
to  prove  its  case. 

More  recently,  Mr.  Louis  Untermeyer, 
for  many  of  whose  poems  and  for  much  of 
whose  critical  information  in  detail  I  have 
a  very  real  respect  and  regard,  makes  him 
self  the  spokesman  of  a  get-together  move 
ment  in  American  literature  Common, 
Poetry  Preferred,  which,  on  the  surface  at 
least,  has  to  do  with  the  spirit  no  less  than 
the  letter  of  the  law.  He  tells  us  that  our 
thinking  is  improving  architecturally  .  .  . 
a  hundred  undermined  and  rotting  formulas 
have  been  explored  and  .  .  .  And  poetry, 
being  the  most  patrician  of  all  the  crafts, 
has  at  least  become  democratized.  All  this 
and  a  good  deal  that  follows  this  in  some 
three  thousand  words  of  "a  compilation  of 
three  causeries  which  were  published  in  the 
Review  of  Reviews,  the  New  York  Evening 
Post  and  the  Chicago  Evening  Post"  which 
was  mailed  me  late  in  November  this  year, 


166     THE   YOUNG   IDEA 

appears  to  me  to  be  more  in  the  nature  of 
a  rather  too  optimistic  resume  than  an  abso 
lutely  constructive  and  impartial  criticism. 
At  the  same  time,  as  Percy  Mackaye  says, 
"poetry  needs  to  be  advertised." 

I  believe  that  Mr.  Untermeyer  is  sincere 
and  close  to  the  truth  when  he  says:  "For 
poetry  is  something  more  than  a  graceful, 
literary  escape  from  life.  It  is  a  spirited 
encounter  with  it."  But  in  his  compilation 
of  our  poetic  assets  and  personalities  in 
America  up  to  date,  and  in  the  general  trend 
of  the  times,  I  do  not  find  conclusive  evidence 
that  poetry  in  America  today  is  proportion* 
ately  any  nearer  to  perfection  technically  or 
any  more  of  a  counsel  of  perfection  in  the 
lives  of  rich  and  poor,  the  masses  and  the 
ittuminati^  than  it  was  three  years,  or  a  little 
more  than  three  years,  ago.  With  all  due  re 
spect  for  Mr.  Brownell  and  one  or  two  of  the 
younger  men  connected  with  The  New  Re 
public  and  the  Seven  Arts  Magazine  and  Mr. 
Untermeyer  himself,  I  do  not  believe  there 
is  a  single  critic  in  America  today  qualified 


THE    PESSIMISTS      167 

by  position  and  native  capacity  to  interpret 
American  literary  tendencies  authoritatively 
any  more  than  there  is  a  single  American 
poet  today  capable  of  inspiring  and  repre 
senting  his  generation  as  Whitman  and 
Pope  did  theirs. 

Rather  than  the  blurbs  and  the  business  of 
blurbing,  the  American  people,  its  poets  and 
other  authors  today  need  a  little  sound  sense 
and  salutory  humility  in  esteeming  accur 
ately  and  impartially  their  approximate  im 
portance  in  the  cosmic  scheme  of  things. 

Talma  said  to  Rachel  once:  "A  little  sor 
row  is  what  you  need,  my  child,  to  make  of 
you  a  great  actress."  But  the  American 
nation  today  needs  more. 

More  than  a  hundred  years  ago  Alexander 
Pope  wrote:  "A  little  knowledge  is  a  dan 
gerous  thing,"  and  failed  to  realize  just  how 
little  the  little  learning  easily  come  by  of 
the  machine,  of  the  public  school,  of  the  pub 
lic  library,  of  the  typical  American  daily 
morning  and  evening  paper  and  monthly 
magazine  would  have  for  us  today. 


168     THE   YOUNG   IDEA 

If  American  literature  in  the  last  fifty 
years  of  easy  money  since  our  Civil  War 
has  not  made  good  as  Russian  literature  has 
in  the  lives  of  Turgenev,  Tolstoi,  Dostoiev 
sky,  Gogol,  Gorki,  Andreyev  and  their  con 
temporaries,  in  the  permanent  products  of 
organized  human  thought  and  emotion,  it  is 
true  that  Russian  literature,  like  Russian 
life,  fights  and  bleeds  today  for  freedom  and 
racial  expression,  and  in  the  fighting  and 
bleeding  is  finding  herself. 

Russia  out  of  her  Nihilists  and  her  ikons 
and  the  blind  urge  toward  light  of  her  masses 
has  achieved  a  national  literature  that  voices 
a  national  soul.  In  the  meanwhile,  we  have 
manufactured  and  exploited  the  literature  of 
the  advertising  page  and  porter,  the  market 
report,  the  society  column,  the  yellow  jour 
nal,  the  yellower  magazine,  the  telephone 
book,  the  motor  blue  book,  the  Christian  Sci 
ence  reading  room,  the  feminist  and  pacifist 
propaganda,  the  Congressional  Record  and 
the  moving  picture  scenario.  We  have  also 
produced  an  Anthony  Comstock  and  his 


THE    PESSIMISTS      169 

successor,  the  lady  novelist,  the  newer  school 
of  feminism  in  fiction,  the  sporting  page  and 
Sunday  supplement  cartoon  serial,  the 
motor  art  catalogue,  the  prospectus  of  the 
hotel  and  the  train  de  luxe,  and  the  publish 
er's  blurb. 

Under  all  these  more  or  less  superficial 
passions  in  print  and  signs  of  the  times  it 
may  be  that  the  soul  of  America  is  still 
dumbly  and  passionately  awake,  still 
urgently  striving  through  the  richest  mate 
rial  for  prose  and  verse  that  any  nation  has 
ever  known  toward  something  like  adequate 
and  inspiring  national  expression.  It  may 
be  that  among  our  young  men  already  be 
ginning  to  be  known  there  is  another  Frank 
Norris,  another  David  Graham  Phillips,  an 
other  Stephen  Crane,  another  William 
Vaughn  Moody  in  the  making.  It  may  be, 
but  the  signs  of  the  times  say  otherwise. 

If  the  American  Democracy  today  is  fun 
damentally  more  than  a  counterfeit  democ 
racy  of  pretence,  on  a  paper  basis  expressed 
in  notes  to  Germany  and  the  voice  of  the 


170     THE   YOUNG   IDEA 

press-agent  everywhere,  if  it  is  anything 
more  than  the  scum  of  the  world's  melting 
pot,  all  these  matters  will  arrange  themselves 
racially  in  time. 
Otherwise  not. 


THE  TRADITIONALISTS 


THE  TRADITIONALISTS 

THE  point  of  view  of  the  six  authors  who 
have  been  grouped  here  as  traditionalists  re 
ceives  its  fullest  explanation  in  the  essay  con 
tributed  by  Mr.  Ledoux.  They  unite  in 
believing  that  contemporary  poetry  has 
discovered  no  new  beauty  to  us,  that  its  cHief 
emphasis  has  been  put  upon  matters  of  tech 
nique  which,  when  all  is  said  and  done,  are 
neither  new  nor  of  compelling  importance. 
They  feel  that  our  life  is  unorganized  and 
chaotic,  and  that  the  lack  of  form  in  which 
it  has  found  expression  interprets  nothing 
essentially  enduring.  In  contrast  to  the 
poets  who  seek  to  react  to  those  phases  of 
experience  which  are  peculiarly  of  our  own 
time,  and  which  give  life  here  and  now  in 
173 


174     THE   YOUNG   IDEA 

America  those  qualities  which  distinguish  it 
from  the  past,  the  traditionalists  assert  that 
the  fundamental  truths  of  life  are  change 
less,  and  that  it  is  the  poet's  business  to  deal 
with  eternal  truths,  and  that  a  work  of  art 
which  is  concerned  chiefly  with  what  is 
contemporary  must  be  truly  vital  to  sur 
vive  the  passing  away  of  its  temporary 
allusion. 

Mrs.  Fannie  Stearns  Gifford  is  well  known 
as  a  writer  of  charming  lyrics. 

It  seems  to  me  that  in  Poetry,  as  in  the 
other  arts,  there  cannot  be  any  real  novelty. 
Poetry  is  like  a  great  fact  of  Nature.  The 
Force  of  Gravity  remains  the  same  forever. 
There  is  nothing  new  about  it  except  the  new 
discoveries  that  may  be  made  as  to  its 
powers ;  the  new  application  of  its  powers  to 
the  uses  of  life. 

So  Poetry  is  never  old,  and  never  new. 
Its  struggle  is  the  ancient  one  to  breathe  the 
wind  of  spiritual  beauty  and  undying  truth 


TRADITIONALISTS     175 

into  material  transiencies.  The  only  real 
question  about  Poetry  is  not  whether  it  uses 
regular  rhythms  and  rhymes,  or  odd  free 
forms;  not  whether  it  interprets  its  sub 
jects  directly  or  by  remote  suggestions,  but 
whether  it  is  Poetry  or  not,  by  any  of  the 
final  tests.  These  tests  are  most  difficult  to 
define  or  describe,  but  they  include  the  quali 
ties  of  beauty,  power  and  truth  in  all  their 
familiar  and  unfamiliar  phases. 

The  "New  Poetry"  of  which  one  hears  so 
constantly  today  seems  to  me  an  attempt, 
sometimes  sincere,  sometimes  meritricious,  to 
express  the  restless  and  troubled  spirit  of 
the  age  in  restless  and  unrestrained  forms. 
Its  novelty  consists  in  only  one  element:  its 
emphasis  on  the  freedom  of  the  poet  to  use 
matter  and  manner  hitherto  dogmatically 
banned  as  "unpoetical." 

But  the  task  (or  joy)  of  the  Poet  is  un 
changed.  A  painter  whose  palette  has  held 
only  dim  neutral  tints  may  discover  wild 
blues  and  greens  and  reds  free  for  his  use, 
but  his  problems  will  not  be  new  nor  his 


176     THE    YOUNG   IDEA 

powers  heightened.  A  poet  in  a  paradise  of 
bizarre  imaginings  and  untrammelled  verse 
must  still  see  and  speak  according  to  his  own 
vision,  or  he  is  not  poet  at  all. 

It  is  difficult  for  me  to  classify  Poetry; 
and  when  I  find  it  classified,  a  curious  revul 
sion  sweeps  over  me,  and  I  am  inclined  to 
echo  Gamaliel's  words: 

"If  this  counsel  be  of  men,  it  will  come  to 
naught ;  but  if  it  be  of  God,  ye  cannot  over 
throw  it." 

All  new  movements  in  Poetry  or  in  life 
must  finally  be  left  to  the  same  impartial 
judgment. 

My  own  verse  has,  I  think,  no  relationship 
to  any  movement.  It  is  made  up  of  echoes 
of  other  people's  poetry,  and  of  my  own 
chance  imaginings.  In  form  it  belongs 
clearly  to  the  "old"  type,  for  I  like  the  music 
of  almost  song-like  rhythms  and  cadences. 
It  is,  for  me,  a  highly  personal  possession, 
somewhat  like  the  clothes  I  make  for  myself 
or  the  flowers  I  try  to  grow,  both  in  interest 
and  in  negligibility. 


TRADITIONALISTS     177 

But,  fortunately,  other  American  poets 
have  a  higher  idealism  and  a  broader  calling. 
The  work  of  Josephine  Preston  Peabody  is 
to  me  representative  of  the  best  type  of 
Poetry  that  America  is  writing  now.  Her 
alert,  human  sympathy,  her  vision  of  high, 
unfading  truth,  and  her  powers  of  beautiful 
song,  satisfy  more  honest  and  deep  demands 
than  any  of  the  so-called  "New"  schools  of 
verse.  There  are  other  poets  with  the  same 
ideals,  if  not  the  same  ways  of  expressing 
them. 

A  man  must  have  Air,  and  Water,  and 
Sleep,  and  Work,  and  Love,  over  and  over 
and  over.  Like  all  those  great  simplicities, 
Poetry  is  Poetry,  over  and  over  and  over. 

Mr.  Louis  V.  Ledoux  has  found  his  in 
spiration  chiefly  in  Greek  legend.  His  most 
recent  volume,  "The  Story  of  Eleusis,"  is 
a  poetic  drama  of  great  beauty  and  deep 
spiritual  vision.  His  essay  is  important  as 
a  criticism  of  the  new  spirit  in  our  poetry 
from  the  viewpoint  of  a  conservative, 


178     THE    YOUNG   IDEA 

The  history  of  art,  like  the  history  of  any 
thing  else,  is  the  record  of  cycles  of  bloom 
and  decay.    The  course  of  literature  is  a 
series  of  movements  which  are  like  the  slow 
swinging  of  some  great  pendulum,  or  would 
be  like  it  were  there  not  present  in  art,  as 
in  life,  a  gradual  evolution  which  makes  any 
cycle,  any  one  swing  of  the  pendulum,  a  little 
different  from  its  predecessor  and  renders 
the  image  inexact.    What  happens  in  art  is 
like,  in  a  smaller  way,  what  happens  in  na 
ture:  earth  moves  through  a  perpetual  re 
currence  of  Spring  and  Autumn  from  some 
beginning  of  which  we  know  little  to  some 
end  of  which  we  know  nothing  at  all;  but 
in  this  apparent  repetition  there  is  a  com 
paratively  unapparent  growth,  a  principle 
of  change  that  can  only  be  observed  in  a 
series  of  centuries.    The  pendulum  swing  of 
literature  is  easier  to  follow  than  is  its  evo 
lution. 

There  are  only  a  limited  number  of  great 
ideas,  or  distinctive  mental  and  emotional 
attitudes  toward  life,  and  these  are  period- 


TRADITIONALISTS     179 

ically   discovered   by   new   generations    of 
artists  just  as  each  new  generation  of  chil 
dren  discovers  for  itself  certain  facts  of  life 
which  come  to  them  with  the  force  of  a  pre 
viously  withheld  revelation.    Some  one  prob 
ably  had  announced  the  return  to  nature 
idea  before  Longus  wrote  "Daphnis  and 
Chloe,"  and  when  time  was  ripe  Rousseau, 
Bernardin  de  St.  Pierre,  Chateaubriand  and 
the  others  of  that  age  discovered  it  again; 
soon,  when  the  force  that  was  in  Walt  Whit 
man  has  been  spent,  some  one  will  rean- 
nounce  the  return  to  nature,  and  the  an 
nouncement  will  be  of  as  much  value  and 
novelty  to  the  new  generation  as  that  made 
by  Longus  was  to  the  one  in  which  he  lived. 
Just  now  in  America  there  is  a  tendency  to 
consider  the  life  of  the  laboring  classes — 
the  comparatively  uneducated  and  unpros- 
perous — the  best  material  for  poetry;  the 
pendulum  is  where  it  was  when  Crabbe  wrote 
his  Tales  of  village  life  and  Wordsworth 
gave  English  literature  a  "new"  subject,  and 
precisely  where  it  was  when  the  poets  and 


180     THE    YOUNG    IDEA 

sculptors  of  third  century  Greece  were  pro 
ducing  statuettes  of  fagot-gatherers  bowed 
beneath  their  burdens  and  writing  idylls  and 
comedies  about  the  problems  of  the  prole 
tariat. 

Much  has  been  said  lately  about  what  is 
called  "the  new  poetry,"  the  claim  of  novelty 
being  based  apparently  on  three  things: 
First,  the  predilection  for  subjects  taken 
from  the  life  of  what  used  to  be  the  lower 
classes  and  the  interest  in  social  problems 
seen  from  the  point  of  view  of  the  oppressed 
or  unfortunate;  second,  the  fondness  for 
distinctively  contemporary  and  probably 
ephemeral  adjuncts  such  as  the  sky-scraper 
and  the  Ford  car;  and  third,  the  develop 
ment  of  a  new  form  of  expression  necessi 
tated  by  the  newness  of  the  thing  to  be  ex 
pressed,.  The  validity  of  the  first  claim  has 
been  somewhat  inadequately  discussed  al 
ready,  and  of  the  second  it  may  be  said  that 
the  use  of  contemporary  adjuncts  does  more 
to  militate  against  the  endurance  of  a  work 
of  art  than  anything  else  could ;  only  a  poem 


TRADITIONALISTS     181 

of  extraordinary  vitality  can  live  under  such 
a  burden.  A  lesser  poet  than  Dante  could 
not  have  survived  the  amount  of  contempo 
rary  scientific  achievement  and  political  dis 
sension  that  makes  the  Divine  Comedy  a 
happy  pasture  for  the  Scholiast;  but  a  more 
simple  instance  may  be  drawn  from  Aristo 
phanes.  No  author  is  more  filled  than  he 
with  contemporary  and  local  allusions ;  to  un 
derstand  half  of  what  his  original  audience 
got  from  him  it  is  necessary  to  master  a  vol 
ume  of  footnotes  greater  than  that  of  the 
text,  but  no  one  except  an  antiquarian  would 
read  Aristophanes  for  the  things  in  his  work 
that  were  primarily  of  contemporary  im 
portance.  One  of  his  plays  opens  somewhat 
as  follows — I  am  quoting  from  memory  and 
away  from  my  books: 

Which  of  the  old  jokes  shall  I  crack,  Master? 
Almost  any  of  them ;  the  audience  is  sure  to 
laugh,  but  for  God's  sake  don't  tell  the  story 
about  So-and-So;  that's  too  old. 

The  story  about  So-and-So  is  as  much  of  a 


182     THE    YOUNG   IDEA 

mystery  to  me  as  what  happened  to  old 
Grouse  in  the  gun-room;  but  that  element 
in  the  bit  of  dialogue  which  is  not  dependent 
upon  the  contemporary  point  makes  the  lines 
for  all  time  a  perfect  opening  for  comedy. 
The  admission  of  a  Ford  car  or  a  sky-scraper 
into  a  poem  will  tend  to  diminish  rather  than 
to  increase  its  chance  of  enduring,  and  con 
sequently,  its  value  as  a  work  of  art. 

The  third  point  upon  which  the  exponents 
of  the  "new  poetry"  base  their  claim  to  new 
ness  and,  what  is  of  considerably  more  im 
portance,  to  artistic  worth,  is  the  form  in 
which  they  express  what  they  have  to  say. 
This  is  merely  a  question  of  technique,  and 
is  of  little  interest  to  anyone  except  artisans 
of  the  poetic  craft.  The  layman  is  like  a 
person  surrounded  by  a  high  board  fence  on 
the  other  side  of  which  are  stretches  of  beau 
tiful  landscape;  the  business  of  the  poet  is 
to  make  a  hole  for  him  through  which  he 
can  see  the  beauty  that  is  beyond,  and  to  the 
man  inside  it  matters  little  how  the  hole  is 
made,  the  vision  is  what  he  needs  to  have 


TRADITIONALISTS     183 

given  him.  A  question  of  technique  would 
not  be  mentioned  here  had  not  some  writers 
of  verse  obtruded  it  (on  public  attention,  in 
sisting  that  holes  must  be  bored  with  a  gim 
let  rather  than  with  an  auger,  and  this  must 
be  answered.  The  view  on  the  other  side  of 
the  fence  is  in  no  way  different  from  what 
it  always  has  been,  and  the  poet  is  free  to 
choose  whatever  tool  suits  him  best ;  he  must 
remember,  however,  that  the  sole  reason  for 
making  the  hole  is  to  give  the  man  inside 
a  vision  that  he  could  not  have  gotten  with 
out  the  poetic  intermediary.  Augers  and 
gimlets  are  equally  useless  when  the  hole  is 
made  in  a  board  beyond  which  there  is  noth 
ing,  for  what  the  poet  says  is  of  infinitely 
more  importance  than  is  the  choice  of  the 
form  in  which  he  chooses  to  say  it. 

The  exponents  of  free-verse  have  claimed 
that  it  was  a  new  development  in  art,  and 
the  validity  of  this  claim  must  also  be  dis 
cussed.  There  is  nothing  new  about  the  free- 
verse  of  the  present  except  the  exaggeration 
of  its  use;  all  competent  writers  from  the 


184     THE    YOUNG   IDEA 

Greek  dramatists  downward  have  introduced 
metrical  variations  to  avoid  monotony,  and 
particularly  to  produce  certain  special 
effects,  usually  of  emphasis.  This  tend 
ency  to  exaggerate  a  minor  point  of  tech 
nique  is  characteristic  of  contemporary 
art  just  as  other  forms  of  exaggeration 
are  characteristic  of  contemporary  life; 
there  was  a  sculptor  not  long  ago  who  real 
ized  poignantly  what  everyone  had  always 
known,  that  the  human  head  is  shaped  more 
like  an  egg  than  it  is  like  an  orange  and  the 
busts  he  produced  emphasized  the  ovoid  form 
to  the  exclusion  of  all  traces  of  physiognomy. 
Perfection  of  form  certainly  cannot  hurt  a 
work  of  art,  and  the  demand  that  artistic  ex 
pression  should  be  a  primitive  rhythmic  is 
based  on  instinct. 

The  other  so-called  modern  schools  can  all 
be  related  to  something  in  the  past;  Imag- 
ism,  for  example,  in  its  practice,  if  not  in  its 
theory,  is  like  an  unconscious  revival  of  the 
Elizabethan  conceit.  The  slopes  of  Par 
nassus  have  always  been  covered  with  mush- 


TRADITIONALISTS     185 

rooms,  but  in  the  restless  eagerness  and  hurry 
of  our  life  we  are  prone  to  rush  out  into  the 
wilderness  after  new  things,  and  when  the 
artist  out  there  calls  loudly  enough  about 
the  novelty  of  his  wares,  we  run  to  see,  for 
getting  the  gist  of  the  whole  matter,  which 
is  this :  a  new  thing,  like  an  old  one,  may  be 
either  worthless  or  of  value;  the  quality  of 
newness  or  the  reverse  that  is  in  it  having 
little  or  nothing  to  do  with  its  worth  as 
poetry  or  as  an  interpretation  of  life.  A 
Ford  car  might  be  mentioned  in  a  poor  poem 
or  a  good  one,  the  fact  of  its  mention  neither 
raises  nor  diminishes  the  value  of  the  piece, 
for  the  things  that  the  poet's  vision  ought  to 
make  him  see  are  things  that  endure,  and 
these  are  without  necessary  localization  in 
time  or  place — as  true  to  San  Francisco  as 
to  Athens,  to  New  York  as  to  Pekin.  The 
setting  of  a  poem  makes  little  difference. 

America  is  uncrystallized  in  its  democracy, 
in  its  life  and,  by  consequence,  in  its  art;  a 
chaos  cannot  be  expressed  or  interpreted  by 
crystallized  forms  and  uncrystallized  form- 


186     THE    YOUNG   IDEA 

lessness,  while  it  may  express,  without  art, 
cannot  interpret.  The  crystal  that  may  ulti 
mately  appear  has  not  yet  been  defined,  and 
while  many  contrary  tendencies  are  discern 
ible,  there  is  no  definite  indication  of  the  fu 
ture.  The  pendulum  swings,  and  after  one 
period  follows  another';  but  in  each  succes 
sion  there  is  variation,  and  the  swinging  has 
always  been  accompanied  by  a  number  of 
eccentric  attempts  to  get  away  from  the 
track. 

The  question  as  to  the  relation  of  my  own 
work  to  the  present  state  and  future  pros 
pects  of  American  poetry  is  a  difficult  one 
to  answer.  A  wave  does  not  go  in  an  oppo 
site  direction  to  the  rest  of  the  sea,  and  all 
I  can  say  is  that  to  my  mind  the  essential, 
enduring  things  of  life  being  infinitely  va 
ried,  it  is  the  business  of  the  poet  simply 
to  make  his  hole  in  that  part  of  the  fence 
where  he  believes  what  he  can  show  to  be 
at  its  finest,  to  bring  as  much  of  his 
vision  as  he  can,  as  much  interpretation  as 
he  can  to  the  man  inside,  and  to  leave  ten- 


TRADITIONALISTS     187 

dencies  on  the  knees  of  the  gods.  I  cannot, 
however,  see  the  advantage  of  putting  the 
hole  in  the  back  of  the  fence,  where  only  a 
brick  wall  will  be  disclosed,  or  the  neighbors' 
wash  which  hung  out  today  will  tomorrow  be 
gone,  when  there  is  the  great  sweep  of  hill 
and  valley  in  front.  There  are  certain  things 
that  every  one  in  all  time  must  face, — death, 
for  example, — and  if  the  poet  illumines  them 
he  has  a  better  chance  of  reaching  more  peo 
ple  for  a  longer  period  than  if  he  treats  of 
things  in  their  aspects  that  have  merely  tem 
porary  significance  for  a  few.  Men  die  at 
one  place  as  at  another,  and  in  its  essentials 
the  problem  was  the  same  to  the  caveman 
that  it  is  to  the  factory-worker.  What  a 
poet  has  to  say — the  power  and  quality  of 
his  vision — is  what  counts,  and  this  comes  to 
him  from  without,  or  from  within,  and  usu 
ally  is  independent  of  volition ;  all  he  can  do, 
and  each  for  himself  alone  must  strive  faith 
fully  to  do  it,  is  to  express  what  he  finds  in 
him  in  the  best  manner  that  is  possible  for 
him  to  attain.  Poetry  is  not  a  parlor  accom- 


188     THE    YOUNG   IDEA 

plishment,  nor  a  means  of  notoriety,  and  the 
genuine  poet,  especially  in  the  America  of 
to-day,  is  under  obligations  to  others  as  well 
as  to  himself. 

This  is  not  a  formal  essay;  it  is  merely  an 
attempt  to  answer  the  given  questions  as 
directly  and  as  concisely  as  possible;  and  I 
have  limited  what  has  been  said  to  the  sub 
ject  of  poetry.  Much  of  what  I  have  tried 
to  bring  out,  however,  can  be  applied  with 
equal  justice  to  other  branches  of  literature 
and  to  other  arts,  particularly  to  painting. 

Mr.  John  G.  Neihardt  is  well  known  as 
the  author  of  "The  Song  of  Hugh  Glass," 
"The  Quest,"  several  other  volumes  of  verse, 
two  novels,  "The  Dawn  Builder"  and  "Life's 
Lure,"  a  volume  of  short  stories  entitled, 
"The  Lonesome  Trail,"  and  a  book  of  travel, 
"The  River  and  I." 

During  the  past  six  years  something  over 
two  thousand  new  books,  representing  every 
phase  of  modern  literature,  have  passed 
through  my  hands.  About  half  of  these  I 


TRADITIONALISTS     189 

have  read,  and  the  rest  I  have  scanned.  I 
am  now  reading  at  the  least  three  represen 
tative  current  books  every  week  and  scan 
ning  as  many  more  volumes.  As  a  result  of 
this  rather  strenuous  experience  I  am  con 
vinced  that  a  new  movement  is  indeed  mani 
fest  in  our  literature.  As  to  its  ideals,  they 
are,  as  everybody  knows,  supposed  to  be  con 
cerned  with  democracy.  Its  relation  to  the 
Past  is,  in  general,  the  relation  of  a  brilliant 
upstart  youth  to  his  dogmatic  elders. 

The  storm-center  of  the  literary  revolt  we 
are  now  witnessing  is  undoubtedly  in  poetry, 
and  for  the  sake  of  brevity  I  prefer  to  limit 
my  remarks  thereto.  As  I  have  noted,  the 
"new"  poetry  is  said  to  be  democratic.  It  is 
democratic  in  the  sense  that  nearly  everyone 
seems  to  be  engaged  in  writing  it;  for  now 
that  the  difficulties  of  the  art  have  been  re 
moved,  a  long  and  faithful  apprenticeship 
seems  no  longer  to  be  necessary.  Anyone 
possessing  pen,  paper  and  an  assortment  of 
vague  emotions  may  easily  qualify.  Thus 
the  realm  of  poetry  has  been  fitted  with 


190     THE    YOUNG   IDEA 

strictly  modern  improvements.  One  no 
longer  scales  Parnassus;  one  takes  the  ele 
vator.  The  "new"  poetry  is  democratic  also 
in  the  sense  that  the  majority  of  our  poets 
profess  to  be  greatly  in  love  with  the  Peo 
ple.  Posterity  will  decide  as  to  how  much 
of  this  is  pose,  inspired  by  that  overwraught 
humanitarianism  now  so  much  in  vogue.  As 
a  reaction  against  a  barren  formalism,  the 
"new"  poetry  will  no  doubt  serve  a  good 
purpose  in  the  end.  Experimentation  is  al 
ways  necessary  in  a  universe  where  rigidity 
is  death. 

But  I  do  not  forget,  as  many  of  my  con 
temporaries  seem  to  do,  that  the  world  did 
not  begin  with  the  present  decade ;  that  world 
literature  is  a  living  thing;  that  its  body  is 
tradition,  and  that  a  poet  can  no  more  dis 
pense  at  will  with  that  tradition  than  he  can 
dispense  with  that  complex  of  psychic  ten 
dencies  which  he  inherits  from  his  ancestors 
and  with  which,  plus  his  individual  experi 
ences,  he  must  build  his  own  unique  person 
ality. 


TRADITIONALISTS     191 

Further,  I  know,  as  any  student  of  great 
poetry  must  know,  that  by  ignoring  the  Past 
the  poet  deliberately  sacrifices  the  chief 
source  of  poetic  power.  For  it  is  mainly  by 
appealing  to  memory  that  poetry  works  its 
magic:  and  the  individual  memory  is  too 
brief,  too  fragmentary.  The  racial  memory, 
rich  with  the  distilled  experience  of  countless 
men  and  women,  is  necessary;  and  racial 
memory  is  literary  tradition. 

So  much  for  substance.  As  to  method,  I 
am  disposed  to  question  those  who  talk  so 
glibly  of  "free  form"  and  who  apparently  do 
not  understand  that  freedom  cannot  be  real 
ized  except  by  obedience  to  unyielding  law. 
I  suspect  that  these  "vers  librists"  confuse 
the  meaning  of  "freedom"  and  "license" — 
a  confusion  characteristic  of  all  so-called 
"democratic"  revolts.  I  find,  also,  that  as 
sense  of  form  decreases,  vagueness  of 
thought  generally  increases. 

The  key  to  the  situation,  it  has  seemed  to 
me,  is  generally  overlooked.  We  err  in  fan 
cying  that  democracy  is  anything  more  than 


192     THE    YOUNG   IDEA 

a  dream.  So  far,  all  that  has  ever  resulted 
from  a  so-called  "democratic"  revolt  has  been 
a  state  of  anarchy.  We  speak  of  "demo 
cratic"  America;  and  America  is  not  demo 
cratic,  but  individualistic — the  exact  oppo 
site.  Likewise,  we  speak  of  a  democratic 
movement  in  poetry.  What  we  have  is  an 
individualistic  movement ;  and  individualism 
is  anarchy. 

From  our  economic  system  on  up  (or 
down!)  to  our  moral  code,  we  are  either  in 
dividualistic  or  are  rapidly  drifting  in  that 
direction.  And  that  is  why  we  are  experi 
encing  an  orgy  of  unsupported  individual 
opinion  in  nearly  every  field  of  human  en 
deavor — religion  conspicuously  included ! 
We  have  already  repudiated  or  are  tending 
to  repudiate  all  standards  of  judgment 
(which  are  the  result  of  the  accumulated  ex 
perience  of  the  race),  and  we  have  set  up 
individual  caprice  as  a  guide.  For  this  rea 
son  we  have  few  authoritative  critics. 

But  I  am  no  pessimist.  On  the  contrary, 
I  have  the  greatest  confidence  in  the  future 


TRADITIONALISTS     193 

of  American  poetry.  Already  we  have  some 
very  remarkable  poets  and  others  are  in  the 
making.  The  change  which  will  reveal  the 
good  and  destroy  the  bad  in  the  new  move 
ment  will,  it  seems  to  me,  be  primarily  eco 
nomic  and  governmental.  On  the  economic 
side,  individualism  must  be  crushed.  On  the 
governmental  side,  there  must  be  a  strong 
centralization  of  power,  bringing  back  to  the 
people  the  fine  old  sense  of  obedience  which 
we  have  temporarily  lost.  Some  great  na 
tional  danger  will  probably  hasten  that  in 
evitable  change.  Powder  smoke  might 
cleanse  us. 

Mr.  Edward  Arlington  Robinson,  author 
of  "The  Town  Down  the  River,"  "Captain 
Craig,"  "The  Man  Against  the  Sky,"  and 
of  a  comedy,  "Van  Zorn,"  has,  perhaps  more 
than  any  other  of  our  contemporary  poets, 
sought  to  express  an  intellectual  content  in 
his  verse. 

You  ask  me  if  I  think  there  is  a  new  move 
ment  in  poetry,  and  my  reply  is  that  there 


194     THE    YOUNG    IDEA 

is  always  a  new  movement  in  poetry.  There 
is  always  a  new  movement  in  everything,  in 
cluding  each  new  inch  of  each  new  revolution 
of  the  earth  around  the  sun.  But  if  you 
mean  to  ask  me  if  this  new  movement  implies 
necessarily  any  radical  change  in  the  struc 
ture  or  in  the  general  nature  of  what  the 
world  has  agreed  thus  far  to  call  poetry,  I 
shall  have  to  tell  you  that  I  do  not  think  so 
• — knowing  very  well  that  my  answer  is  worth 
no  more  than  that  of  any  other  relatively  in 
telligent  individual. 

In  referring  to  a  new  movement  I  assume 
that  you  refer  primarily  to  vers  libre — a 
form,  or  lack  of  form,  that  may  or  may  not 
produce  pleasant  results.  I  do  not  know 
that  there  is  any  final  reason  why  this  mode 
of  expression  should  not  give  pleasure  as 
often  as  any  other,  although  I  do  know,  so 
far  as  I  am  concerned,  that  in  the  majority 
of  cases  it  does  not.  I  have  read  furlongs 
of  it,  but  the  amount  that  has  given  me  any 
solid  satisfaction  could  easily  be  measured 
in  a  few  yards  at  the  most.  I  say  this  with 


TRADITIONALISTS     195 

reluctance,  for  I  know  that  some  of  my 
friends  will  disagree  with  me  entirely,  and 
be  tempted  in  all  probability  to  call  me 
names.  Some  of  them  may  call  me  a  con 
servative,  others  a  reactionary;  and  all  this 
in  spite  of  the  fact  that  I  have  been  accused 
in  the  past  of  being,  if  anything,  too  modern. 
But  these  accusations  were  made  long  ago; 
and  I  fancy  that  my  limited  public  has  come 
by  this  time  to  see  that  I  was  never  so  peril 
ously  modern,  after  all. 

If  there  be  a  new  movement  in  poetry 
that  can  be  definitely  labeled,  such  a  move 
ment  will  probably  be  found  to  have  more 
to  do  with  vocabulary  and  verbal  arrange 
ment  than  with  metrical  or  non-metrical 
form.  The  poetry  of  the  next  few  hundred 
years  will  in  all  probability  have  an  incisive- 
ness  and  a  clarity  that  have  not  generally 
prevailed  heretofore,  and  some  of  the  best  of 
it  may  be  written  in  vers  libre;  although  my 
own  opinion  is  that  most  of  the  best  of  it  will 
be  written  in  some  form  or  other  that  shall 
have  a  definite  metrical  pattern.  I  may  be 


196     THE    YOUNG   IDEA 

grievously  in  the  wrong,  yet  it  seems  to  me 
that  up  to  this  time  vers  libre  has  been  its 
own  worst  indictment,  in  that  perhaps  less 
than  one  per  cent  of  it  may  be  said  to  pos 
sess  the  quality  that  gives  pleasure.  In  spite 
of  the  fact  that  it  has  produced  several  in 
teresting  and  stimulating  results,  I  am  in 
clined  to  the  belief  that  the  vers  libre  move 
ment  has  seen  its  best  days,  and  that  the  few 
writers  who  have  succeeded  in  making  it  in 
teresting  are  still  to  do  their  best  work  along 
more  traditional  lines,  in  which  there  is  room 
for  any  amount  of  innovation  and  variety. 
But,  as  I  said  before,  my  opinion  is  merely 
that  of  an  individual,  possibly  prejudiced, 
and  is,  therefore,  to  be  taken  as  such  and  as 
nothing  more. 

In  reply  to  your  request  for  a  criticism  of 
contemporary  American  literature,  perhaps 
I  had  better  keep  to  the  subject  of  poetry 
and  express  my  belief  in  the  genuineness  of 
its  "revival"  and  in  the  significance  of  much 
that  has  been  published  during  the  past  few 
years. 


TRADITIONALISTS     197 

Mrs.  Blanche  Shoemaker  Wagstaff  's  most 
recent  volume  is  "Eris." 

It  is  my  belief  that  the  new  movement  in 
modern  literature  and  art  is  an  expression 
of  social  democracy,  a  note  of  international 
ism  that  indicates  the  attitude  of  the  world 
today.    The  European  war  has  brought  all 
nations  face  to  face  with  the  sternest  facts 
of  existence,  and  as  a  result  poetry  has  be 
come  inoculated  with  a  vigorous  realism — it 
is  stripped  of  symbol  and  romantic  sugges 
tion;  flowering  artifice  having  been  discarded 
for  sturdier  forms  of  feeling.     Huysmans, 
Zola,  Verhaeren  and  Gide  in  France,  and 
Masefield  in  England,  have  been  the  progen 
itors  of  the  present  realistic  movement  in 
poetry.      It  satisfies  modern  cosmopolitan 
needs;  but,  in  my  opinion,  it  is  only  an 
ephemeral  current  that  will  be  replaced  by 
a  reactionary  aristocracy  in  life  and  letters. 
Just  as  from  archaic  art  emerged  the  efflor 
escence    of    Hellenic    sculpture,    so    from 
Cubism,  Imagism  and  all  the  various  pres- 


198     THE    YOUNG   IDEA 

ent-day  schools  there  will  occur  a  reversion 
to  intellectual  austerity.  Art  has  a  temper 
amental  flux  that  varies  with  the  impulse  of 
the  age — so  ultimately  in  all  countries  there 
must  re-arise,  as  a  reflex  of  modern  realism, 
a  more  austere  technique,  a  truer  emotional 
ism  and  a  finer  spirituality  in  poetry.  The 
idealism  of  antiquity  will  re-awaken  to  tem 
per  our  boisterous  modernism,  and  to  tran- 
quilize  the  realistic  democracy  of  American 
art. 

My  own  work  is  naturally  influenced  to  a 
certain  degree  by  the  modern  impetus — but 
essentially  I  prefer  the  artistic  ideal  of  Mar 
lowe,  of  Shelley, of  Swinburne,  of  Sophocles, 
of  Milton.  But  I  feel  that  the  student  of  the 
classical  cannot  exempt  himself  without  loss 
from  the  modern  trend  of  art  which,  despite 
its  many  unfortunate  aspects,  is  a  vigorous 
infusion  of  new  energies. 

Mr.  Thomas  Walsh  is  known  for  his  beau 
tiful  poems  dealing  with  the  history  and  the 


TRADITIONALISTS     199 

art  of  Spain,  "The  Pilgrim  Kings:  Greco 
and  Goya,  and  Other  Poems  of  Spain." 

There  is  nothing  new  under  the  sun,  not 
even  today:  and  it  does  not  seem  to  me  that 
we  have  any  new  elements  in  our  literary 
production  that  give  any  warrant  for  doubt 
of  the  belief  that  the  future  will  be  as  the 
past.  The  Papal  Delegate,  Archbishop 
Bonzano — a  man  of  unusual  culture — 
summed  up  our  American  literature  as 
"plentiful,"  and  his  irony  reveals  the  atti 
tude  of  the  matured  scholar  in  the  presence 
of  the  clamors  of  the  very  young  and  the 
very  wild. 

There  has  been  a  great  deal  of  very  dis 
jointed  reasoning  regarding  the  rules  of 
aesthetics  that  were  settled,  it  seemed,  some 
thousand  years  ago;  and  we  have  beheld  in 
these  discussions  the  results  of  that  modern 
philosophy  which  abandons  and  flouts  at 
any  connected  relation  between  the  different 
branches  of  human  knowledge  and  morals. 
The  young  radical  of  today's  letters  is  the 


200      THE   YOUNG   IDEA 

natural  son  of  Matthew  Arnold  and  his 
school,  although  I  think  Arnold  himself 
would  be  rather  surprised  at  the  progeny  he 
has  produced.  The  abandonment  of  law  and 
order  in  philosophy  has  merely  preceded  the 
abandonment  of  law  and  order  in  the  arts. 
Our  young  writers  are  honestly  expressing 
themselves;  they  are  possessed  of  a  lawless 
sympathy  with  everything,  whether  it  should 
have  sympathy  or  not.  Mercy  has  been  de 
clared  the  most  modern  virtue  in  literature, 
but  it  seems  we  have  reached  a  point  where 
it  has  become  stupidity. 

To  me  the  real  performances  in  literature 
today  are  very  much  akin  to  those  of  the  past 
generations.  There  is  an  added  quality  of 
simplicity  and  sincerity,  but  the  same  mate 
rials  and  the  same  general  ambitions  and 
spirit.  Today  our  audiences  are  more  mixed 
and,  from  an  Anglo- Celtic  point  of  view, 
more  alien  to  the  standards  that  have  ruled 
us  in  America  in  the  past.  Art  still  remains 
the  expression  and  the  enjoyment  of  the  few 
— who  seem  fewer  today  only  because  of  the 


TRADITIONALISTS    201 

greatness  of  the  variety  of  outsiders  who  are 
untutored  and  unprepared  for  an  opinion, 
not  to  mention  taking  a  hand  in  its  current 
production. 


CONCLUSION 


CONCLUSION 

The  results  of  this  investigation  require 
little  interpretation.  Certain  conclusions 
are  immediately  apparent.  There  is  a  sin 
gular  unanimity  of  opinion  with  respect  to 
the  predominating  tendency  in  our  contem 
porary  writing;  a  return  upon  life,  and, 
more  specifically,  upon  contemporary  Amer 
ican  life,  as  the  subject  matter  of  our  writ 
ing.  The  younger  writers  are  urging  as  their 
claim  to  attention  that  they  are  dealing  with 
the  life  which  they  see  about  them,  and  of 
which  they  are  a  part,  and  that  they  are  deal 
ing  with  this  life  in  its  own  terms ;  they  are 
quick  to  perceive  the  poetic  core  of  common 
experience,  and  it  is  this  that  they  would  re 
veal  in  their  art.  They  have,  in  Mr.  Unter- 
meyer's  eloquent  phrase,  discovered  the 
205 


206     THE    YOUNG    IDEA 

beauty  and  dignity,  and,  one  might  add,  the 
romance  of  the  commonplace.  This  discov 
ery  is  not  without  its  peculiar  significance. 
For,  in  dealing  with  the  everyday  life  of  our 
democracy,  they  are  forced  to  take  into  ac 
count  the  disproportion  between  its  basis  in 
ideality  and  its  functioning  in  actuality. 
Thus  it  is  that  contemporary  literature,  and 
particularly  contemporary  poetry,  is  ex 
pressing  a  social  content.  In  their  primary 
task  of  actually  living,  the  poets  are  discov 
ering  as  the  foundation  upon  which  rests  our 
national  life  the  articulate  masses  who  are 
striving  for  self-expression,  and  they  are  ex 
pressing  the  thoughts,  the  feelings,  the  hopes 
and  the  tragedies  of  these  masses  in  their 
verse.  They  are  appealing  to  us  less  as 
lovers  of  art  than  as  lovers  of  life,  they  are 
striving  to  move  our  humanity,  to  arouse  a 
social  consciousness.  They  conceive  art  as 
a  means  of  expressing  life,  and  since  they  are 
taking  as  their  province  the  whole  of  life, 
they  would  be  bound  by  no  traditional  con 
ceptions  of  beauty.  If  we  urge  against  them 


CONCLUSION  207 

a  preoccupation  with  the  sordid,  the  violent 
and  the  hideous,  they  will  answer  us  that  all 
these  are  phases  of  the  life  which  they  are 
experiencing.  And  they  will  show  us  where 
in  they  have  been  revealing  the  new  beauty 
which  is  being  evolved  in  the  democracy  of 
labor.  They  are  confident  idealists,  seeking 
to  reconstruct  our  life  by  widening  and  deep 
ening  our  conceptions  of  experience.  In 
aesthetics,  therefore,  they  are  distinctly  revo 
lutionists,  revolting  against  the  view  that  art 
is  a  refuge  from  life  and  vigorously  refusing 
allegiance  to  a  tradition  which  they  feel 
would  limit  not  only  the  content  of  their  art, 
but  the  form  in  which  that  content  is  to 
achieve  expression. 

There  is,  however,  in  these  expressions  of 
opinion  less  discussion  of  poetic  form  than 
one  would  naturally  expect  in  a  time  when 
our  notions  of  poetic  form  seem  superficially 
to  be  undergoing  a  process  of  far-reaching 
and  deliberate  modification.  The  emphasis 
of  the  poets  seems  rather  to  be  in  the  direc 
tion  of  content ;  it  is  as  though  they  believed 


208      THE    YOUNG   IDEA 

that  content  shapes  its  own  form  and  that  the 
business  of  the  reader  lies  with  the  content 
of  art,  and  with  its  form  only  indirectly,  in 
determining  whether  the  medium  of  expres 
sion  is  the  best  possible  medium  for  convey 
ing  the  particular  emotional  experience  of 
which  it  is  the  vehicle.  No  one  who  reads,  to 
choose  a  striking  example,  the  essay  of  Mr. 
Arthur  Davison  Ficke  can  doubt  that  the 
various  metrical  experiments  of  the  new 
schools  are  less  a  deliberate  program  of  re 
form  in  poetic  diction  than  the  logical  result 
of  a  fresh  way  of  looking  at  life. 

There  is,  likewise,  a  vigorous  recognition 
of  an  increasing  seriousness  in  outlook 
among  our  writers,  a  disposition  to  penetrate 
beneath  the  merely  superficial  externalities 
of  life,  and  to  seek  for  fundamental  spiritual 
values.  I  have  grouped  together  four  poets 
who  have  emphasized  this  spirit  most 
strongly  under  a  single  heading,  but  the  bar 
riers  of  classification  break  down  upon  this 
question.  Mr.  Joyce  Kilmer,  for  example, 
whose  work  in  both  poetry  and  prose  reveals 


CONCLUSION  209 

as  sure  a  discovery  of  the  romance  of  the 
commonplace  as  does  any  of  the  writers 
grouped  under  that  general  heading,  believes 
that  the  most  important  tendency  in  our  con 
temporary  literature  is  its  expression  of  spir 
itual  experience.  It  would  not  be  just  to 
deny  the  existence  of  this  tendency  in  the 
work  of  other  poets  who  are  not  grouped 
with  Mr.  Kilmer.  It  is,  perhaps,  more  hon 
est  to  say  that  the  poets  are  reacting  to  spir 
itual  experience  in  the  terms  of  a  more 
homely  reality  than  heretofore. 

The  differences  existing  between  the  con 
servatives  and  the  radicals  are  admirably 
illustrated  by  a  comparison  between  the  con 
tributions  of  Miss  Margaret  Widdemer  and 
Mr.  Louis  Ledoux.  Miss  Widdemer  tells 
us  that  today  the  poets  are  reflecting  the  atti 
tude  toward  life  of  their  own  time,  and  of  an 
experience  produced  by  the  special  circum 
stances  of  life  here  and  now  in  America.  Mr. 
Ledoux  reminds  us  that  the  fundamental 
realities  of  life  are  changeless,  and  that  their 
contemporary  attributes  are  largely  tempo- 


210     THE    YOUNG   IDEA 

rary  and  ephemeral  in  their  nature.  Both, 
perhaps,  would  agree  upon  the  eternal  na 
ture  of  life's  great  experiences,  but  Mr.  Le- 
doux  has  not  remarked  that  the  reaction  to 
these  experiences  is  a  product  of  the  special 
conditions  of  life  in  the  age  in  which  they 
achieve  expression,  and  thus  varies  from  age 
to  age,  while  Miss  Widdemer's  implication 
is  that  we  live  in  a  peculiarly  self-conscious 
time,  and  that  we  are  therefore  anxious  to 
analyze  our  individual  reactions  to  life.  Mr. 
Ledoux  reproaches  contemporary  writers 
for  expressing  too  great  an  interest  in  the 
contemporary  aspects  of  life;  Miss  Widde- 
mer  tells  us  that  the  poet  of  today  is  inter 
ested  in  just  those  things  which  make  today 
different  from  yesterday,  and  has  no  thought 
of  eternity. 

There  is,  moreover,  a  further  difference  of 
opinion  between  the  Conservatives  and  the 
Radicals,  centering  upon  the  question  of 
technical  innovations.  In  general,  the  Con 
servatives  agree  that  a  greater  freedom  of 
poetic  form  will  undoubtedly  result  in  an  in- 


CONCLUSION  211 

fluence  for  the  good  upon  poetic  diction; 
what  they  object  to  is  the  anarchy  of  the 
present.  Both  Conservatives  and  Radicals 
seem  to  be  united  in  a  suspicion  of  "schools" ; 
and  among  all  the  contributions,  only  four 
could  with  absolute  certainty  be  referred  to 
definite  movements.  Those  of  Miss  Lowell 
and  Mr.  Fletcher  belong  by  right  to  the 
Imagist  movement,  although  neither  of  the 
poets  have  discussed  the  specific  tenets  of 
that  school  in  their  contributions.  Miss  Anne 
Knish,  who,  with  Mr.  Emmanuel  Morgan, 
represents  the  Spectrist  group,  is  slightly 
contemptuous  of  our  latter-day  search  for 
novelty,  and  explains  Spectrism  as  a  fresh 
interpretation  of  Classic  gospels.  Mr.  Don 
ald  Evans,  whose  "Sonnets  from  the  Pata- 
gonian"  resulted  in  his  being  credited  with 
the  foundation  of  another  school,  does  not 
mention  its  existence,  and  places  his  own 
work  as  being  midway  between  the  Radicals 
and  the  Conservatives  in  temper. 

But  although  the  existence  of  all  sorts  of 
movements  is  denied,  there  is,  in  a  wider 


212      THE   YOUNG   IDEA 

sense,  a  distinct  movement  in  contemporary 
American  letters,  having  as  its  basis  the  com 
mon  ideal  of  a  determination  to  express  a  re 
action  to  experience  in  terms  of  the  thoughts 
and  feelings  of  our  own  time  and  country. 
The  methods  by  which  this  is  being  accom 
plished  are  largely  individual,  and  are  told 
in  the  statements  of  the  writers  who  have  re 
sponded  to  this  investigation  of  their  ideals ; 
any  repetition  here  would  be  both  redundant 
and  impertinent.  Any  investigation  of  this 
nature  must  necessarily  be  incomplete  in  its 
results.  One  cannot  mobilize  all  contempo 
rary  writers  for  an  expression  of  opinion; 
there  are  several  whose  absence,  for  one  rea 
son  or  another,  from  this  volume  is  heartily 
to  be  deplored.  But  investigations  such  as 
this  have  the  virtue  of  bringing  together  a 
number  of  varied  and  representative  points 
of  view  with  reference  to  certain  specific 
questions  which  are  of  fundamental  import 
ance  in  appraising  the  value  of  our  literary 
activity.  And  therefore  I  believe  this  little 
book  will  have  its  place  in  criticism  as  a  rec- 


CONCLUSION  213 

ord  of  the  spirit  and  the  ideals  and  the  ideas 
underlying  the  work  of  American  writers 
who  are  coming  into  their  own  in  the  present 
day. 

LLOYD  R.  MORRIS. 


14  DAY  USE 

RETURN  TO  DESK  FROM  WHICH  BORROWED 

LOAN  DEPT. 

This  book  is  due  on  the  last  date  stamped  below,  or 

on  the  date  to  which  renewed. 
Renewed  books  are  subject  to  immediate  recall. 


IN 


6  5 


«££ 


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JUN  8  0 1965 


FEB13'69-1PM 


REC-n  i 


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DEPT. 


E 

9 


RETCFiVFn 


LOAN   IJLHI. 


YB  74660 


THE  UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY 


